^.r> 


.ORD  ALFRED  DOUGLAS 


Hiim)Hmi}tniiitiiii!UifiutJif!!i!!iiSiiiii;n'!i{:'nn 


\   IN- 


OSCAR  WILDE  AND  MYSELF 


OSCAR    WILDE 
AND    MYSELF 


BY 


LORD  ALFRED  DOUGLAS 


WITH   PORTRAIT   OP   THE    AUTHOR 

AND    THIRTEEN   OTHER    PORTRAITS   AND   ILLUSTRATIONS 

ALSO   FAC-SIMILE   LETTERS 


New  York 

Duffield  &  Company 
1914 


Copyright,  1914,  by 
DuFTiBW)   &  Company 


Preface 

THE  manuscript  of  this  book  was  completed 
by  me  and  handed  over  to  the  publishers 
as  long  ago  as  last  July.  Certain  persons 
thereupon  deemed  it  advisable  to  apply  to  the  Court 
for  an  injunction  restraining  me  from  including 
in  my  book  any  of  the  letters  from  Oscar  Wilde 
which  were  in  my  possession,  and  they  further 
applied  for  an  injunction  restraining  me  from  quot- 
ing from  the  unpublished  portion  of  the  **De 
Profundis"  manuscript  which  is  now  sealed  up  at 
the  British  Museum  and  which  was  used  against 
me  in  open  Court  as  part  of  the  justification  in  the 
defence  to  a  libel  action  brought  by  me  jn  ApriL 
191 3.  The  application  for  these  injunctions  was 
made  in  the  Vacation  Court  before  Mr.  Justice 
Astbury,  the  most  recent  recruit  to  the  Judicial 
Bench.  It  was  immediately  granted,  and  though 
I  was   advised  by  counsel  to  appeal   against    the 


vi  Preface 

decision,  I  thought  it  better  to  accept  it,  at  any  rate 
for  the  moment.  Consequently,  ail  the  copious 
extracts  I  was  intending  to  publish  from  the  "  De 
Profundis,"  which  extracts  had  already  been  repro- 
duced in  all  the  newspapers  at  the  hearing  of  the 
action  of  Douglas  v,  Ransome  and  The  Times 
Book  Club  have  been  entirely  removed.  The  same 
applies  to  those  letters  of  Wilde's  which  I  had 
originally  included  in  my  book.  As  far  as  the  let- 
ters are  concerned,  the  omission  does  not  very 
much  aifect  the  book.  The  letters  were  included 
not  to  make  points  against  my  opponents,  but 
merely  as  interesting  curiosities.  The  enforced 
omission  of  the  extracts  from  the  unpublished  **De 
Profundis"  has,  on  the  other  hand,  been  an  un- 
doubted handicap  to  me.  A  considerable  portion 
of  this  book  is  devoted  to  a  reply  to  the  violently 
mendacious  attacks  made  upon  me  and  upon  my 
family  by  Wilde  in  that  unpublished  portion  of  the 
**  De  Profundis"  which  has  been  accepted  by  the 
authorities  of  the  British  Museum  from  the  literary 
executor  of  the  late  author.  Obviously  it  is  very 
difficult  to  reply  to  an  attack  which  one  is  unable 
to  quote,  and  I  can  only  say  that  I  have  met  the 


Preface  vii 

difficulty  as  best  1  could,  and  that  at  a  future  date 
I  look  forward  to  being  able  to  deal  with  the  whole 
matter  even  more  completely  and  finally.  In  this 
connection  I  refer  my  readers  to  the  chapter  in  this 
book  entitled  *' A  Challenge  to  Mr.  Ross." 

ALFRED    BRUCE    DOUGLAS 

Boulogne-sur-Mer 
April,  1 9 14 


To  my  Mother 
Sibyl,  Marchioness  of  Queensberry 


Contents 


CHAPTER  PAGE 

Introductory 3 

I.  Oxford .  11 

II.  Lost  Illusions 25 

III.  Wilde  in  Society 33 

IV.  The  Lord  of  Language 42 

V.  Our  Mutual  Friends 53 

VI.  Lord  Queensberry  Intervenes      ...  68 

VII.  The  Wilde  Trials 90 

VIII.  Hard  Labour  and  After 106 

IX.  Naples  and  Paris 122 

X.  The  "Ballad  of  Reading  Gaol"     .      .      .  140 

XI.  The  Truth  about  "De  Profundis"  .     .  146 

XII.  My  Letters  to  Wilde 166 

XIII.  My  Letters  to  Labouchere      .     .     .      .  179 

XIV.  The  Article  in  THE  "Revue  Blanche"    .  184 
XV.  Fifteen  Years  of  Persecution      .     .     .189 

XVI.  Wilde's  Poetry 197 

XVII.  The  Plays  and  Prose  Works  ....  213 

XVIII.  For    Posterity      ........  226 

XIX.  The  British  Museum  and  "De  Profun- 
dis"    232 

xi 


xii  Contents 

CHAPTER  PAGB 

XX.  Ransome's  "Critical  Study"    ....  240 

XXI.  My  Actions  for  Libel 247 

XXII.  "The  Picture  of  Dorian  Gray"     .     .     .255 

XXIII.  Literature  and  Vice 266 

XXIV.  Crosland  and  "The  First  Stone"     .     .  272 
XXV.  A  Challenge  to  Mr.  Ross 278 

XXVI.  Wilde  in  Russia,  France  and  Germany  283 

XXVII.  The  Smaller  Fry 289 

XXVIII.  To  Be  Done  with  It  All 294 

Index 299 


List  of  Illustrations 

Lord  Alfred   Douglas Frontispiece 

TO  FACE   PAGE 

Oscar  Wilde 20 

Lord  Alfred  Douglas,  at  the  age  of  twenty-one,  at 
Oxford 30 

Caricature  by  Max  Beerbohm  of  Oscar  Wilde  and 
Lord  Alfred  Douglas 56 

Oscar  Wilde's  House,  16  Tite  Street,  Chelsea  .     .     68 

The  Late  Marquis  of  Queensberry 86 

Drawing  of  Lord  Alfred  Douglas,  at  the  age  of 
Twenty-four 104 

Cafe  de  la  Paix,  Paris 126 

Grand  Cafe,  Paris 132 

Hotel  d'Alsace,  Paris 138 

Raymond  Wilfrid  Sholto  Douglas,  only  child  of 
Lord  Alfred  Douglas 160 

Lady  Alfred  Douglas 194 

KiNMouNT  House,  Annan,  the  Seat  of  the  Late 
Marquis  of  Queensberry,  where  Lord  Alfred 
Douglas's  childhood  was  passed     ....  228 

Monument  erected  over  Oscar  Wilde's  Grave,  Pere 

la  Chaise,  Paris 246 

xiii 


OSCAR  WILDE  AND  MYSELF 


Introductory 

OUT  of  little  things  there  may  come  a  peck 
of  troubles.  I  suppose  that  my  first 
meeting  with  Oscar  Wilde  was  to  me, 
at  that  time,  a  little  thing.  By  this  I  do  not  mean 
that  I  was  other  than  glad  to  meet  a  man  of  Wilde's 
culture  and  attainments,  but  I  was  not  particularly 
impressed  by  him  at  first,  and,  if  I  had  never  set 
eyes  on  him,  I  should  certainly  have  lost  nothing. 
As  Fate  arranges  matters,  our  acquaintance  has 
brought  the  gravest  disasters,  not  only  upon  myself, 
but  upon  those  nearest  and  dearest  to  me.  The 
purpose  of  the  present  book  is  not  to  complain  of 
what  had  happened  or  to  rail  against  Oscar  Wilde, 
who,  for  years,  was  my  close  friend  and  who,  at  one 
time  in  our  friendship,  held  me  fascinated  by  what 
I  conceived  to  be  his  genius.  That  he  had  what 
passed  for  genius  nobody  will,  I  think,  nowadays 
dispute,  though  it  used  to  be  the  fashion  to  pooh- 
pooh  him  for  a  mere  poseur  and  decadent.  If  our 
friendship   had   remained   a   private   friendship — 

3 


4  Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

like  many  other  of  Wilde's  friendships — instead  of 
being  bruited  abroad  from  every  housetop,  this 
book  would  never  have  been  written.  From  the 
moment  Wilde's  name  became  notorious,  however, 
people  have  been  careful  to  link  our  names  to- 
gether, and  even  more  careful  to  link  them  together 
in  scandalous  ways.  There  are  many  persons  now 
alive  who  were  friends  with  Wilde  in  the  days  of 
his  greatness  and  prosperity;  and,  without  a  single 
exception,  so  far  as  I  am  aware,  their  friendship 
is  reckoned  to  their  credit,  and,  in  some  instances, 
has  proved  highly  advantageous  to  them  from 
many  points  of  view.  Yet  what  was  a  virtue  in 
these  persons  would  seem  to  have  been  a  crime  in 
me.  I  have  never  boasted  of  my  relations  with 
Wilde  and,  though  I  have  had  many  proposals  from 
editors  and  publishers  to  say  my  say  about  my 
friend  for  handsome  remuneration,  I  have  never 
previously  taken  a  penny  piece  from  any  of  them. 
I  have  always  known  that  there  was  nothing  in  our 
friendship  of  which  I  need  be  ashamed  and, 
although  the  tongue  of  malice  and  slander  has  been 
busy  with  my  name  almost  without  ceasing  since 
the  day  of  Wilde's  downfall,  I  looked  to  time  and 
the  facts  to  set  me  right. 

Since  Wilde's  downfall,  my  life  has  been  lived 
tender  conditions  of  which  it  is  to  be  hoped  few 


Introductory  5 

persons  have  had  experience.  Always  I  have  had 
to  fight  the  cunningly  contrived  innuendo  which, 
while  it  could  not  be  nailed  to  the  counter  and  re- 
butted in  the  Courts  of  Law,  nevertheless  did  its 
deadly  work  and  threw  its  bitter  odium  over  my 
name  and  fame.  On  occasions  out  of  number  I 
have  had  to  take  expensive  legal  proceedings  in 
sheer  self-defence.  Generally,  the  parties  con- 
cerned have  been  people  of  straw,  who  apologised 
abjectly  or  disappeared  or  got  out  by  asserting  that 
they  did  not  mean  what  they  had  tried  to  say,  imme- 
diately the  writs  were  issued.  My  own  determina- 
tion has  always  been  to  refrain  from  litigation 
on  the  subject,  unless  it  were  absolutely  forced  upon 
me.  How  far  I  was  wise  in  this  determination 
is  another  affair. 

It  may  seem  a  simple  and  easy  thing  to  wipe  out 
slander.  How  difficult  it  is,  only  the  few  persons 
who  have  had  a  really  foul  and  abominable  slander 
put  up  against  them  can  know.  In  addition  to  the 
multitudinous  gentlemen  with  ready  pens  who  have 
not  scrupled  to  decry  and  defame  me,  I  have  for 
years  had  to  contend  with  the  class  of  persons  who 
had  letters  to  sell  or  letters  to  print,  and  who  have 
ever  been  handy  with  their  documents  and  '^inside 
information"  when  opportunity  might  arise 
whereby  they  hoped  to  turn  an  honest  penny.    For 


6  Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

these  gentry  I  have  encouraged  a  proper  contempt, 
and  not  one  of  them  has  had  from  me  a  single  six- 
pence or  a  breath  of  appeal  for  the  mercy  which 
they  believed  themselves  capable  of  extending. 
Later,  a  Mr.  Arthur  Ransome — whom  I  had  not 
known  as  an  acquaintance  of  Wilde  and  who  had 
no  acquaintance  with  myself — went  out  of  his  way 
to  assert  in  a  book,  which  purported  to  be  an  inti- 
mate study  of  Wilde,  that  the  latter  had  attributed 
some  measure  of  his  public  obloquy  to  my  influence 
over  him ;  and,  further,  that  I  had  lived  upon  Wilde 
after  his  imprisonment  and  left  him  stranded  at 
Naples  when  his  financial  resources  were  exhausted. 
I  took  an  action  for  libel  against  Ransome  and  his 
publishers  and  The  Times  Book  Club,  with  the  re- 
sult that  the  publishers  withdrew  Ransome's  book 
from  circulation,  leaving  him  and  The  Times  Book 
Club  to  make  what  defence  they  could.  The  jury 
found  for  the  defendants  on  the  first  libel,  and  that 
the  second  libel  was  not  a  libel  at  all.  It  will  interest 
all  parties  concerned  to  know  that  this  is  exactly 
the  finding  which  I  anticipated,  and  it  is  note- 
worthy that  the  libels  of  which  I  complained  have 
been  expunged  from  the  new  edition  of  the  book. 
Mr.  Justice  Darling  and  the  defendants'  counsel 
repeatedly  observed  during  the  course  of  the  trial 
that  they  could  not  understand  what  motive  had 


Introductory  7 

prompted  me  to  come  into  court.  A  letter  which 
Wilde  addressed  to  me  previous  to  his  imprison- 
ment, and  other  letters  which  I  had  written  to  him, 
were  read  by  defendants'  counsel.  Judge,  counsel 
and  jury  alike  appear  to  have  imagined  that,  if  I 
had  known  of  the  existence  of  these  letters,  I  should 
not  have  brought  my  action.  In  point  of  fact,  I 
was  well  aware  of  their  existence  and  I  was  told, 
while  the  action  was  still  pending,  that  they  were 
to  be  raked  up  and  that  I  should  be  ''simply  evis- 
cerated" in  the  witness-box.  Well,  I  went  like  a 
lamb  to  the  evisceration,  and  Mr.  Justice  Darling 
marvelled  at  my  lack  of  worldly  wisdom. 

In  the  following  pages  I  shall  set  out  the  whole 
details  of  my  relationship  with  Oscar  Wilde,  and 
I  do  so,  not  by  way  of  defence  or  apology — ^because 
I  need  neither — but  simply  with  a  view  to  making 
clear  in  the  public  interest,  and  for  the  benefit  of 
posterity,  the  true  inwardness  of  Wilde's  writing 
and  character.  I  take  this  step  as  much  for  Wilde's 
sake  as  for  my  own. 

During  his  imprisonment  at  Reading,  Oscar 
Wilde  was  permitted  the  use  of  pen  and  ink,  and 
he  appears  to  have  relieved  the  tedium  of  his  in- 
carceration by  writing  eighty  thousand  words,  or 
thereabouts,  addressed  to  myself.  A  copy  of  the 
manuscript  is  alleged  to  have  been  sent  to  me  by 


8  Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

post,  shortly  after  its  completion.  Half  of  it  has 
been  published  under  the  aegis  of  Mr.  Robert  Ross, 
and  is  known  to  the  world  as  "De  Profundis."  The 
nature  and  drift  of  the  published  portion  of  the 
MSS.  needs  no  comment  from  me  at  this  juncture. 
The  unpublished  parts,  however,  may  reasonably 
be  described  as  a  frantic  attack  upon  me.  Till  a 
copy  of  this  attack  came  into  my  hands  during  the 
time  the  Ransome  action  was  pending,  I  had  no 
knowledge  of  its  existence.  At  the  trial,  it  trans- 
pired that  this  farrago  of  hysterical  abuse  had  been 
handed  by  Mr.  Ross  to  the  authorities  at  the  British 
Museum  as  a  present  to  the  nation,  and  that  it  was 
not  to  be  made  public  till  1960,  when  it  is  to  be 
hoped  we  shall  all  be  dead.  I  could  have  wished, 
for  the  sake  of  my  old  friend,  that  Mr.  Ross  had 
seen  the  wisdom  of  destroying  a  piece  of  writing 
which  even  Mr.  Justice  Darling  conceives  to  be 
evil  and  discreditable  to  its  author.  Whether  or 
not  it  is  my  property  is  a  legal  problem.  I  have 
applied  to  the  British  Museum  for  its  return,  but 
so  far  without  success.  Mr.  Ross's  "present  to 
the  nation"  may  possibly  abide  on  the  British 
Museum's  shelves,  unperused  by  the  curious,  till 
1960.  My  own  present  to  Mr.  Ross  and  to  the 
weeping  worshippers .  of  Wilde  is  delivered  here- 
with, and  can  be  opened  and  read  by  him  who  runs 


Introductory  9 

while  we  have  still  a  little  breath.  The  result  of 
Mr.  Ross's  action  would  seem  to  be  that,  if  the  Brit- 
ish Museum  do,  in  fact,  disclose  the  contents  of  the 
manuscript  after  my  death  Wilde  will  be  disgraced 
and  confounded  on  his  own  evidence. 


Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 


CHAPTER  I 

OXFORD 

AFTER  leaving  Winchester,  where  I  won  the 
school  steeplechase  and  edited  a  paper 
-  called  the  Pentagram — the  only  literary 
or  journalistic  venture,  by  the  way,  out  of  which 
I  ever  made  a  profit — I  went  up  to  Oxford  in  the 
ordinary  course.  I  was  entered  at  Magdalen  Col- 
lege, and  I  remained  an  undergraduate  of  the 
University  for  four  years.  Magdalen,  as  it  always 
has  been  in  recent  times,  and  still  continues  to  be, 
was  considered  a  more  or  less  fashionable  college. 
It  was  the  never-ending  boast  of  Oscar  Wilde  that 
he  had  been  there.  The  continuous  ''when  I  was 
at  Oxford"  which  crops  up  in  his  writings  was 
complemented  by  continuous  ''when  I  was  at  Mag- 
dalen" in  his  conversation.  I  do  not  know  that 
there  was  anything  extraordinary  about  Magdalen 
in  my  time.  I  look  back  upon  my  life  there  as 
fairly  pleasant,  and  chiefly  so  because  I  had  the 
companionship  of  my  friend,  the  late  Viscount  En- 

II 


12  Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

combe,  whose  death  at  the  early  age  of  twenty- 
eight  was  a  great  blow  to  me.  Of  course,  I  met  at 
Oxford  all  the  people  who  were  supposed  to  be 
worth  meeting.  There  was  Mr.  Warren,  then,  as 
now.  President  of  Magdalen,  whom  I  remember  on 
account  of  his  black  beard  and  his  very  obsequious 
treatment  of  myself.  He  was  a  profound  admirer 
of  Matthew  Arnold,  whose  poetry  he  urged  me  to 
study  and  imitate.  He  also,  rather  incongruously, 
professed  great  admiration  for  the  writings  of  his 
personal  friend,  John  Addington  Symonds.  I  say 
''incongruously;''  for  an  admiration  for  Matthew 
Arnold  ought  surely  to  preclude  an  admiration  for 
Symonds,  at  any  rate,  as  far  as  poetry  is  concerned. 
For  Oscar  Wilde  he  also  admitted  a  great  par- 
tiality. They  had  been  contemporaries  at  the  Uni- 
versity in  their  undergraduate  days  and,  to  a  certain 
extent,  friends.  When  Wilde  came  up  to  see  me 
at  Oxford,  he  always  made  a  point  of  calling  on 
Mr.  Warren,  and  on  these  occasions  I  invariably 
accompanied  him,  and  I  thus  had  the  advantage 
of  profiting  by  their  conversation,  which,  needless 
to  say,  generally  turned  on  literary  matters;  but  I 
cannot  honestly  say  that  I  was  greatly  edified  or 
that  any  gems  of  purest  ray  serene  from  these  duo- 
logues have  remained  shining  in  my  memory.  When 
I  first  became  an  intimate  friend  of  Oscar  Wilde, 


Oxford  13 

my  mother,  who  had  an  instinctive  disHke  of  Wilde, 
wrote  to  Mr.  Warren  and  asked  him  if  he  consid- 
ered Wilde  was  the  sort  of  man  who  would  be  a 
good  friend  for  me.  The  President,  in  reply,  sent 
her  a  long  letter  in  which  he  gave  Wilde  a  very 
high  character,  praised  his  great  gifts  and  achieve- 
ments of  scholarship  and  literature,  and  assured  her 
that  I  might  consider  myself  lucky  to  have  obtained 
the  favourable  notice  of  such  an  eminent  man.  I 
mention  this,  not  as  anything  to  Mr.  Warren's 
detriment,  but  simply  to  show  the  sort  of  reputation 
Wilde  at  that  time  enjoyed  among  the  big-wigs  of 
the  University. 

Then  there  was  Walter  Pater,  to  whom  I  was 
introduced  by  Wilde  on  the  first  occasion  when  the 
latter  visited  me  at  Oxford.  Wilde  had  an  im- 
mense opinion  of  Pater  and  spoke  of  him  always 
with  reverence  as  the  greatest  living  writer  of  prose. 
I  tried  hard  to  appreciate  Pater  and  he  personally 
was  kind  to  me,  but  quite  apart  from  the  fact  that 
he  had  practically  no  conversation  and  would  sit 
for  hours  without  saying  more  than  an  occasional 
word,  I  never  could  bring  myself  to  have  more 
than  a  very  limited  admiration  for  his  far-famed 
prose,  which  has  always  seemed  to  me  artificial, 
finnicking  and  over-elaborated  to  an  exasperating 
degree.     I  have  altogether  livelier  recollections  of 


14  Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

Mr.,  now  the  Reverend  Dr.  Bussell,  Pater's  most 
intimate  friend  at  Brazenose,  for  he  was  a  fine 
musician  and  had  a  devotion  to  Handel  and  Bach 
which  endears  his  memory  to  me  to  this  day. 

Next  to  Encombe,  probably  my  best  friend  among 
the  undergraduates  of  my  day  was  the  poet  Lionel 
Johnson,  a  frail,  tiny  man,  with  probably  the  finest 
head  and  the  kindest  heart  in  the  University.  We 
talked  and  wrote  a  considerable  amount  of  poetry 
together,  and  it  was  Johnson  who  introduced  me 
to  Oscar  Wilde.  At  this  period  Wilde  had  just 
begun  to  be  considered  a  person  of  some  promise 
m  letters.  He  had  outgrown  "sesthetics"  and  had 
written  "The  Picture  of  Dorian  Gray"  and  "Inten- 
tions," and  was  rehearsing  his  first  play:  Lady 
Windermere's  Fan, 

One  vacation  I  went  with  Johnson  to  Wilde's 
house  in  Tite  Street,  and  over  dinner  commenced 
a  friendship  which  was  to  be  none  too  fortunate  for 
either  of  us.  For  some  reason  or  other  Wilde  in- 
sisted on  being  considerably  more  brilliant  that 
evening  than  ever  he  was  afterwards.  Indeed,  he 
fired  oflf  witticisms  so  persistently  and  with  such  an 
evident  anxiety  not  to  miss  even  the  slenderest  of 
opportunities  that,  while  I  had  come  to  the  meeting 
in  the  spirit  of  the  youthful  admirer,  or  literary 
hero-worshipper,  I  went  away  with  a  sort  of  feeling 


Oxford  15 

that  I  had  been  at  a  show  and  that  I  had  not  seen 
a  really  great  man  after  all.  However,  as  our  ac- 
quaintance ripened,  I  began  to  understand,  or  im- 
agine that  I  understood,  Wilde's  moods.  I  soon 
perceived  that  he  said  quite  half  of  everything  he 
had  to  say  with  his  tongue  in  his  cheek  and  that  one 
should  not  really  take  him  seriously,  because  his 
only  aim  in  conversation  was  not  to  say  what  he 
believed,  but  to  say  what  he  supposed  to  be  witty, 
profound,  whimsical  or  brilliant  at  the  moment. 
Further,  I  soon  discovered  that  Wilde  was  one  of 
those  conversationalists  who  were  conscious  of  the 
value,  not  only  of  their  own  mots,  but  of  those  of 
other  people,  and  that  his  or  my  joke  or  epigram 
let  loose  over  lunch  on  Monday  was  bound  to  figure 
in  the  bit  of  dialogue  or  portion  of  an  essay  which 
he  would  indite,  with  the  help  of  stifif  whiskies-and- 
sodas  and  illimitable  cigarettes,  on  a  Tuesday  morn- 
ing. At  the  same  time,  I  cheerfully  admit  that  I 
found  him  an  agreeable,  entertaining  and  even 
lovable  acquaintance.  He  had,  of  course,  an  eye 
for  humour  and  beauty,  he  was  a  great  deal  of  a 
scholar,  he  spoke  good  English  and  excellent 
French,  and  he  had  a  pleasant  voice  and  a  charming 
delivery.  Compared  with  the  average  man-about- 
town  he  shone,  and  compared  with  the  average 
*'man  of  genius"  he  scintillated. 


16  Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

During  my  second  year  at  Oxford  I  contributed 
to  the  Oxford  Magazine,  the  official  journal  of  the 
University,  a  poem  which  pleased  everybody  but  its 
author  and  provoked  the  excellent  Mr.  Warren  to 
write  me  a  lengthy  letter  of  praise  and  congratula- 
tion. Unfortunately,  I  have  not  got  this  epistle  at 
hand,  otherwise  I  might  be  tempted  to  print  it  with 
a  view  of  convincing  the  University  Oxford  that  I 
am  indeed  somewhat  of  a  poet.  This  was  the  first 
serious  poem  I  ever  wrote  or,  at  any  rate,  preserved, 
and  it  is  now  included  in  the  ''City  of  the  Soul."  I 
also  contributed  on  several  occasions  to  an  under- 
graduate paper  called  The  Spirit  Lamp^  which  was 
owned  by  a  man  whose  name  I  forget,  but  he  called 
on  me  one  day  and  explained  that  he  was  going- 
down  and  very  munificently  offered  to  make  me  a 
present  of  his  journalistic  property  if,  as  he  diffi- 
dently put  it,  I  cared  to  take  it  on  and  would  prom- 
ise to  continue  its  high  traditions  to  the  best  of 
my  ability.  I  gave  this  gentleman  the  necessary 
assurances,  and  The  Spirit  Lamp  became  mine.  Six 
or  seven  subsequent  numbers  appeared  under  my 
editorship,  and  copies  of  these  numbers  are,  I  under- 
stand, worth  considerably  more  than  their  published 
price  in  what  is  known  as  the  market.  Of  my  own 
contributions  I  have  a  poor  opinion,  though  they 
were  warmly  appreciated  at  the  time  of  their  ap- 


Oxford  17 

pearance  by  that  class  of  person  who  makes  warm 
appreciations  a  sort  of  hobby.  I  am  proud  of  the 
fact,  however,  that  I  printed  some  of  Lionel  John- 
son's best  verses  and  several  contributions  from 
the  late  John  Addington  Symonds,  and  I  also  had 
the  advantage  of  various  contributions  from  Wilde, 
including  his  prose  poems  "The  Disciple"  and  "The 
House  of  Judgment,"  and  what  I  consider  to  be 
the  best  sonnet  he  ever  wrote.  Wilde  frequently 
came  to  Oxford  in  those  days,  and  on  several  occa- 
sions stayed  as  my  guest  in  the  rooms  in  High 
Street  which  I  shared  with  my  friend.  Lord  En- 
combe. 

Although  throughout  my  career  as  an  under- 
graduate I  was  keenly  interested  in  poetry  and 
letters  generally,  I  did  not  profess  to  belong  to  any 
literary  set  and  I  had  no  notion  of  taking  to  writing 
as  a  profession.  My  name  and  family  traditions 
marked  me  out  for  the  sporting  and  convivial  side 
of  University  life  rather  than  for  serious  literary 
endeavour.  I  read  for  the  Honours  school  in  a 
desultory  kind  of  way,  but  relieved  the  tedium  of 
my  prescribed  studies  by  a  good  deal  of  riding  and 
boating  and  fairly  regular  attendance  at  such  race- 
meetings  as  were  within  reasonable  distance  of 
what  Mr.  Ruskin  doubtless  called  his  Alma  Mater. 
At  the  same  time,  my  interest  in  poetry  was  well 


18  Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

known  in  the  University,  and  I  was  considered  a 
poet  of  promise  and  parts. 

Of  course,  every  undergraduate  who  can  write 
poetry  at  all  is  expected  to  compete  for  the  Newdi- 
gate  prize.  I  was  frequently  urged  by  my  friends 
to  enter  for  this  prize,  but  none  of  the  subjects  set 
during  my  first  three  years  at  Oxford  appealed  to 
me.  Tennyson,  if  I  remember  rightly,  won  the 
Newdigate  with  a  poem  about  Timbuctoo.  Such 
a  subject  while,  perhaps,  entertaining  enough  in 
its  way,  is,  obviously,  not  very  inspiring  and  cer- 
tainly not  calculated  to  induce  the  production  of 
high  poetry.  As  I  have  said,  the  subjects  set  in 
my  first  three  years  did  not  excite  in  me  any  great 
poetical  emotion.  In  my  fourth  year,  however,  the 
subject  was  St.  Francis  of  Assisi,  and  I  felt  at  once 
that  here  was  my  opportunity.  I  told  my  friends 
that  I  should  enter,  and  began  to  plan  the  poem.  I 
was  talking  of  the  matter  at  dinner  one  night,  with 
Encombe  and  the  late  Lord  Warkworth — after- 
wards Earl  Percy,  who  was  at  that  time  at  Christ- 
church — and  I  told  the  latter  that  I  was  going  in 
for  the  prize.  He  said  that  he,  too,  was  having 
a  shot  at  it,  and  pointed  out  that  it  was  impossible 
for  me  to  enter  as  I  was  in  my  fourth  year.  He 
offered  to  show  me  the  rule  in  the  Statutes,  but, 
unfortunately,  we  had  not  a  copy  handy  and  I  took 


Oxford  19 

it  that  Warkworth  knew  what  he  was  talking  about 
and  let  the  thing  drop.  Lord  Warkworth  won  the 
Newdigate  that  year  himself,  and  it  was  only  after 
the  announcement  of  his  success  that  I  discovered 
that  there  was  no  such  rule  as  the  one  he  had  told 
me  of.  Of  course,  I  make  no  aspersion  on  Wark- 
worth's  good  intentions  in  the  matter;  yet,  in  a 
sense,  it  is  a  pity  that  I  did  not  look  more  closely 
into  the  rules,  because,  though  I  say  it  myself,  I 
could  have  beaten  him  with  a  good  many  lengths 
to  spare,  and  though  to  have  won  the  Newdigate 
means,  perhaps,  very  little  from  a  literary  point 
of  view,  it  appears  to  be  a  good  backing  for  a  man 
who  goes  in  seriously  for  poetry. 

I  have  noticed  with  some  astonishment  that 
whenever  opportunity  has  arisen  persons  who  do 
not  love  me  have  been  at  pains  to  suggest  that  there 
was  something  discreditable  about  my  Oxford 
career.  It  has  been  hinted  that  I  was  "sent  down" 
in  disgrace,  and  great  capital  has  been  made  of  the 
circumstance  that  I  left  Oxford  without  a  degree.  In 
point  of  fact,  I  was  ''sent  down''  in  my  second  year 
for  a  term  because  I  was  ''ploughed"  in  my  exam- 
ination for  "smalls,"  and  I  soon  set  this  right  by 
spending  three  weeks  with  a  crammer  and  getting 
myself  well  posted  up  in  Euclid  and  such-like  sub- 
jects, which,  though  doubtless  very  important  in 


20  Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

their  way,  had  never  specially  attracted  me.  When 
the  time  came  for  my  examination  in  the  Honours 
school  I  happened  to  be  ill  and  was  unable  to  attend, 
so  that  I  left  the  University  degreeless.  Without 
any  suggestion  from  me,  the  authorities  offered  to 
confer  an  honorary  degree  upon  me  if  I  cared  to 
return  in  the  vacation  and  pass  two  papers.  I  con- 
sulted my  father,  the  late  Marquis  of  Queensberry, 
on  the  subject,  and  he  told  me  that  he  had  never 
known  a  degree  to  be  worth  twopence  to  anybody, 
and,  accordingly,  I  never  took  the  trouble  to  avail 
myself  of  the  Oxford's  kind  offer.  If  going  dow^n 
without  a  degree  is  a  crime,  I  belong  to  an  excellent 
company  of  criminals,  for  Swinburne  left  Oxford 
minus  a  degree  and  so  did  Lord  Rosebery  and,  if  it 
comes  to  genius,  so  did  the  poet  Shelley. 

I  need  hardly  say  that  Oscar  Wilde  expressed 
himself  as  entirely  delighted  with  my  remissness  in 
failing  to  become  an  M.A.  Oxon.  He  said,  in  his 
usual  airy  way,  that  it  was  "wonderful"  of  me  and 
a  ''distinction,"  and  he  pointed  out  that  I  should  be 
like  Swinburne,  who  determined  to  remain  an 
undergraduate  all  his  life.  I  am  free  to  confess 
that  personally  I  did  not  take  much  interest  in  the 
matter  either  way,  though,  had  I  understood  the 
world  then  as  I  understand  it  now,  I  might  have 
been  a  trifle  less  careless. 


OSCAR  WILDE 


Oxford  21 

Generally,  I  do  not  wish  it  to  be  supposed  that 
my  life  at  Oxford  was  any  more  immaculate  than 
that  of  other  young  men  in  my  own  position  in 
life.  I  came  into  collision  with  the  authorities  on 
various  small  sins  of  omission  and  commission.  I 
was  gated  once  for  going  to  the  Derby — wicked 
youth  that  I  was! — and  I  dare  say  I  worried  the 
authorities  by  my  persistent  refusal  to  take  either 
themselves  or  the  University  for  the  most  serious 
thing  in  nature.  But  I  lived  with  them  gloriously 
and  delicately  for  the  full  undergraduate  span  of 
four  years,  save  one  term  over  ''smalls,"  and,  as 
I  have  shown,  they  were  quite  willing  to  take  me 
to  their  bosom  as  a  full  member  of  the  University 
if  I  had  cared  to  fall  into  their  embrace. 

The  idea  that  Oxford  is  a  place  entirely  given 
over  to  the  laborious  and  the  assiduous  pursuit  of 
knowledge  is  a  mistake.  It  can  be  proved  quite 
easily  that,  while  the  assiduous  and  the  laborious 
who  choose  to  make  Oxford  a  sort  of  career  may 
do  very  well  out  of  it  in  the  way  of  Fellowships, 
scholastic  appointments,  and  so  forth,  the  best  men 
Oxford  turns  out  are,  in  the  main,  men  who  have 
been  considered  to  have  missed  their  opportunities. 
Everybody  who  was  anybody  at  Oxford  in  my  time 
had  a  disposition  to  be  very  modest  about  learning 
and  a  trifle  shy  about  recommending  it  as  the  be-all 


22  Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

and  end-all  of  life.  There  is  a  tale  attributed  to  a 
certain  worthy  Don — indeed,  it  is  said  to  have  been 
his  stock  story — which  relates  to  two  excellent  youths 
of  good  family  who  went  up  to  Oxford  together. 
One  of  them  was  slack  and  fond  of  his  ease;  he 
read  nothing  and  did  nothing  and,  after  years  of 
dissipation,  was  fain  to  get  a  living  by  driving  a 
hansom-cab.  The  other  youth,  the  pride  of  his 
family  and  college,  read  everything  and  won  every- 
thing and  did  everything  that  was  proper.  Years 
after,  somebody  found  him  in  London  doing  his 
best  to  keep  the  wolf  from  the  door  by  driving  a 
four-wheeler.  This  is  an  old  story,  but  it  is  a  very 
good  one,  and  anybody  who  knows  Oxford  in  the 
intimate  personal  sense  knows  how  true  it  may  well 
be.  For  myself,  I  think  if  it  had  come  to  cab-driving 
the  hansom  would  unquestionably  have  been  my 
vehicle. 

I  was  careless  and  desultory  in  the  widest  sense 
of  the  terms ;  so  careless  and  desultory,  in  fact,  that, 
with  a  view  to  saving  time  and  trouble  in  my  inter- 
course with  the  authorities,  I  had  a  form  printed  as 
follows : — 

Lord  Alfred  Bruce  Douglas  presents  his 

compliments  to 

and   regrets   that   he  will   be   unable   to 
in  consequence  of 


Oxford  23 

Filled  up,  this  ingenious  document  would  read 
as  follows:  — 

Lord  Alfred  Bruce  Douglas  presents  his 
compliments  to  Professor  Smith  and  re- 
grets that  he  will  be  unable  to  show  up 
an  essay  on  the  Evolution  of  the  Moral  , 
Idea  in  consequence  of  not  having  pre- 
pared one. 

I  found  these  missives  extremely  useful  and  used 
a  great  quantity.  They  were  famed  throughout  the 
University  and,  though  they  angered  some  of  the 
Dons  to  the  verge  of  madness,  nothing  could  be 
done  about  them,  because  they  were  obviously 
polite,  and  an  undergraduate  who  is  polite  to  his 
pastors  and  masters  has  done  his  duty.  It  may  be 
on  the  strength  of  this  form  and  on  my  being  ''sent 
down"  for  a  failure  to  pass  ''smalls"  that  the  legend 
and  fiction  of  my  alleged  ignominious  career  at 
Oxford  depends.  I  know  of  nothing  more  serious, 
otherwise  I  should  be  pleased  to  unburden  myself. 
Both  before  and  after  I  terminated  my  undergrad- 
uateship  by  removing  my  name  from  the  books  of 
Magdalen  College,  I  was  a  frequent  visitor  to  the 
scene  of  my  old  triumphs  and  kept  up  many  friend- 
ships among  the  men  of  my  time  and  among  the 
University  authorities.  I  removed  my  name  from 
the  books  of  my  own  free  will  and  as  a  matter  of 


24  Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

personal  convenience.  What  I  did  may  have  been  a 
trifle  unusual,  though  I  am  acquainted  with  at  least 
one  distinguished  Oxford  man  who  did  precisely 
the  same  thing,  and  that  my  actions  should  have 
been  twisted  into  a  sort  of  horrible  wickedness  must 
have  startled  a  good  many  other  people  besides 
myself. 

So  much  for  the  gay  Lord  Alfred  Douglas,  under- 
graduate of  Magdalen  College,  Oxford. 


CHAPTER  II 

LOST  ILLUSIONS 

IT  is  very  hard,  indeed,  wellnigh  impossible,  for 
me  to  recapture  and  set  forth  for  the  benefit 
of  my  readers  the  secret  of  the  fascination  that 
Oscar  Wilde  had  for  me  in  those  f ar-ofif  days.  The 
revelation  of  his  perfidy  and  vileness  which  came 
to  me  when,  about  a  year  ago,  I  first  got  knowledge 
of  the  existence  of  the  unpublished  portion  of  ''De 
Profundis,"  the  shock  of  horror,  indignation  and 
disgust  which  the  reading  of  that  abominable  docu- 
ment produced  in  my  mind,  and  the  ever-recurring 
reflection  that  during  the  last  few  years  of  his  life 
and  after  his  release  from  prison,  when  he  was  pro- 
fessing the  greatest  friendship  and  afifection  for  me 
and  living — for  a  time  in  part,  and  ultimately  alto- 
gether— on  my  bounty,  he  was  all  the  while  the 
secret  author  of  a  foul  and  lying  attack  on  me  and 
on  my  family  which  he  had  arranged  to  make  pub- 
lic after  my  death,  combine  to  make  the  task  of 
reconstructing  a  semblance  of  my  old  feeling  for 
him  almost  a  hopeless  one.     Long  however  before 

25 


26  Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

I  had  cognisance  of  the  unpublished  ''De  Pro- 
fundis,"  my  view  of  his  character  and  my  estimate 
of  his  value  as  a  man  of  letters  had  undergone  a 
profound  change.  With  the  passing  of  the  years  and 
a  more  serious  and  mature  outlook  on  the  facts  of 
life  and  on  the  responsibilities  of  those  who  seek 
the  suffrages  or  merely  the  ears  of  the  general 
reader,  I  had  arrived  at  the  conclusion  that  Oscar 
Wilde's  writings  were  ridiculously  overrated,  that 
he  was  never  either  a  great  poet  or  a  great  writer 
of  prose,  and  that  the  harm  he  had  caused  to  the 
whole  body  of  English  literature  and  the  pernicious 
effect  he  had  exercised  on  the  literary  movements 
and  the  journalism  of  the  period  immediately  suc- 
ceeding his  own,  very  much  more  than  counter- 
balanced the  credit  of  any  legitimate  success  he  may 
have  achieved.  Still,  up  till  the  period  when  the 
discovery  of  the  unpublished  part  of  "De  Profun- 
dis''  was  forced  upon  my  notice,  I  carefully  re- 
frained from  giving  voice  to  these  sentiments.  The 
man  had  been  my  friend,  I  had  been  very  fond  of 
him,  and  I  had  formerly  had  an  exaggerated  view 
as  to  the  value  of  his  work.  I  did  not  therefore 
consider  that  I  was  in  any  way  called  upon  to  inter- 
fere with  his  literary  reputation,  even  though,  in 
my  opinion,  it  was  a  specious  reputation  and  the 
result,  moreover,  of  a  cleverly-engineered  campaign 


Lost  Illusions  27 

on  his  behalf,  made  by  friends  who  were  more  care- 
ful of  Wilde's  fame  than  of  the  general  good  of 
letters. 

Still  less  did  I  conceive  it  to  be  any  part  of  my 
duty  to  attack  what  was  left  of  his  character.  On 
the  contrary,  I  steadily  persisted  in  taking  the  best 
view  possible  of  the  man,  and  until  I  read  the  un- 
published ^'De  Profundis''  I  kept  a  great  measure 
of  my  affection  for  his  memory  and,  in  common 
with  many  other  people,  cherished  fond  illusions 
about  his  moral  character.  That  my  affection  for 
him  was  real  and  sincere  and  continued  to  be  so 
right  up  to  the  time  when  I  read  the  unpublished 
part  of  "De  Prof undis''  is  fairly  proved  by  the  facts 
that  I  persistently  defended  him — even  at  the  cost 
of  some  violence  to  my  own  literary  conscience — in 
the  columns  of  the  Academy,  when  I  was  its  editor, 
and  that  I  wrote  to  his  memory  one  of  my  best 
sonnets,  which  I  herje  reproduce: — 

The  Dead  Poet 

I  dreamed  of  him  last  night,  I  saw  his  face 
All  radiant  and  unshadowed  of  distress, 
And  as  of  old,  in  music  measureless, 
I  heard  his  golden  voice  and  marked  him  trace 
Under  the  common  thing  the  hidden  grace, 
And  conjure  wonder  out  of  emptiness. 
Till  mean  things  put  on  beauty  like  a  dress 
And  all  the  world  was  an  enchanted  place. 


28  Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

And  then  methought  outside  a  fast  locked  gate 
I  mourned  the  loss  of  unrecorded  words, 
Forgotten  tales  and  mysteries  half  said, 
Wonders  that  might  have  been  articulate. 
And  voiceless  thoughts  like  murdered  singing  birds. 
And  so  I  woke  and  knew  that  he  was  dead. 

Now  I  wrote  that  sonnet  as  long  ago  as  1901,  within 
a  few  months  of  Wilde's  death,  but  I  included  it  in 
my  1909  volume  of  sonnets  and,  in  face  of  it,  I  could 
not  possibly  pretend,  even  if  I  wished  to  do  so,  that 
I  was  not  at  one  time  deeply  attached  to  him  and 
that  I  continued  to  cherish  his  memory  after  his 
death.  But  when  it  comes  to  explaining  that  attach- 
ment and  reproducing  the  atmosphere  which  gen- 
erated it,  I  find  that  I  am  met  at  the  outset  by  this 
deplorable  set-back — namely  and  to  wit:  that  the 
very  qualities  in  him  which  then  excited  my  admira- 
tion, now  evoke  my  contempt.  It  must  be  remem- 
bered that  when  I  met  Wilde  I  was  very  young  in 
years,  and  still  younger  in  temperament  and  in 
experience.  I  was,  in  fact,  a  mere  child.  I  repro- 
duce on  the  opposite  page  a  photograph  of  myself, 
taken  in  my  second  year  at  Oxford,  just  about  the 
time  I  first  met  Wilde.  It  is  obviously  the  photo- 
graph of  a  boy — and  a  fairly  unsophisticated  boy, 
at  that.  There  are  numbers  of  my  friends  and  con- 
temporaries at  Oxford,  now  living,  and  they  could 
all  bear  witness  to  the  fact  that  even  at  the  age  of 


Lost  Illusions  29 

twenty-three  I  had  the  appearance  of  a  youth  of 
sixteen ;  and  though,  of  course,  I  should  have  been 
woefully  offended  if  any  one  had  told  me  so  at  the 
time,  there  was  much  in  my  character  that  corre- 
sponded with  my  appearance.  I  don't  think  there 
was  ever  any  one  so  easily  deceived,  such  an  obvious 
mark  for  the  designing,  as  I  was  in  those  days.  I 
was  never  allowed  to  forget  that  I  was  Lord  Alfred 
Douglas,  the  son  of  a  marquis  and  a  person  of  con- 
sequence. The  mere  fact  that  I  thought  myself 
very  knowing  and  a  complete  man  of  the  world  only 
served  to  make  me  an  easier  victim  to  any  accom- 
plished teller  of  the  literary  tale.  Wilde  made  a 
dead  set  at  me.  He  was  attracted  by  my  youth,  my 
guilelessness,  and — to  be  perfectly  frank — by  what 
he  considered  my  social  importance,  and  he  laid 
himself  out  to  captivate  me  and  to  fascinate  me. 

He  was  then  about  forty  years  of  age ;  he  was  a 
brilliant  talker — every  one  admits  that:  I  have 
never  heard  it  denied,  even  by  his  greatest  enemy; 
he  was  utterly  unlike  any  one  or  anything  that 
I  had  ever  come  across  before,  and  he  had  that  sort 
of  assumption  of  certainty  about  all  the  problems 
of  life  which  is  one  of  the  compensations — ex- 
changed for  many  other  better  things — that  comes 
at  that  age  to  an  accomplished  man  of  the  world. 
He  had  a  habit  of  enunciating  the  most  entirely 


30  Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

unmoral  and  subversive  sentiments  in  a  manner 
and  with  an  air  of  final  authority  which  could  not 
fail  to  appeal  to  a  high-spirited  youth,  already  in- 
clined— as  is  the  manner  of  high-spirited  youth — 
to  kick  over  the  traces.  According  to  him,  it  didn't 
matter  in  the  least  what  one  did  as  long  as  one 
happened  to  be  "a  charming  and  graceful  young 
man,  related  to  every  one  in  the  peerage,"  and  did 
whatever  one  wanted  to  do  in  "s,  charming  and 
graceful  manner."  This  "simple  and  beautiful" 
theory  appealed  irresistibly  to  me,  as  it  very  well 
might  to  any  thoughtless  youth;  and,  coming  as 
it  did  from  one  who  was  actually  looked  up  to  and 
admired  by  the  President  of  my  College,  and  who 
had  been  commended  to  my  mother  as  a  most  de- 
sirable acquaintance  for  me,  it  naturally  seemed  the 
last  word  of  wisdom.  But  how  can  I  be  expected 
now  to  have  anything  but  contempt  for  such  arts, 
practised  by  a  clever  man  of  the  world  on  an  unre- 
flecting boy  ?  Or  how  can  I  be  blamed  because  the 
recollection  of  the  fact  that  I  was,  for  the  time, 
attracted  by  such  preposterous  and  poisonous  spe- 
ciousness  is  anything  else  but  repugnant  to  me  now 
when  I  look  back  on  it  ? 

In  my  desperate  anxiety  to  do  justice  to  the  mem- 
ory of  one  who  was  formerly  my  friend,  I  might 


LORD  ALFRED  DOUGLAS,    AT  THE  AGE   OF  TWENIY-ONE, 
AT   OXFORD 


Lost  Illusions  31 

be  tempted  to  give  more  instances  of  his  method  of 
dealing  with  young  men  whose  good  will  he  was 
anxious  to  obtain;  but  by  so  doing  I  should  add 
nothing  to  his  reputation,  even  for  cleverness.  It 
is  the  easiest  thing  in  the  world  to  turn  the  head 
of  a  young  fellow  at  Oxford  or  Cambridge.  Any 
man  of  the  world  could  do  so,  if  he  cared  to  take 
the  trouble  and  was  sufficiently  unscrupulous.  It 
does  not  require  great  wit  or  great  brains  or  any- 
thing but  impudence  and  a  blunted  sense  of  honour. 
These  two  ''qualities"  Wilde  undoubtedly  possessed. 
It  is  easy  for  any  one  who  has  not  forgotten  the 
time  of  his  own  youth  to  see  how  Wilde  contrived 
to  attract  me.  He  flattered  me  incessantly,  he  pro- 
fessed extreme  admiration  for  the  few  poetical 
efforts  which  I  had  then  produced — efforts,  by  the 
way,  which,  in  his  Reading  Gaol  days,  became  poor 
^'undergraduate  verses" — and  whatever  I  did  or 
whatever  I  said  was  "wonderful"  in  his  eyes.  He 
displayed  all  the  outward  signs  and  symbols  of 
friendship  and  affection.  He  has  himself  set  them 
all  out  faithfully,  so  that  I  am  spared  the  necessity 
of  reproducing  them  here.  I  will  merely  put  it  on 
record — to  give  him  the  whole  of  the  credit  that 
can  possibly  be  due  to  him — that,  in  the  matter  of 
sending  expensive  bunches  of  muscat  grapes  and 
copies  of  the  illustrated  papers  to  my  bedside  when 


32  Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

I  happened  to  be  ill,  promptly  replying  to  requests 
for  an  immediate  despatch  of  cigarettes  when  I  had 
gone  away  to  the  country  and  forgotten  to  take 
them  with  me,  and  remembering  my  favourite 
dishes  when  I  happened  to  dine  with  him,  he  was 
''all  that  a  loving  heart  could  wish."  I  accepted 
these  husks  for  the  real  bread  of  friendship,  and 
because  it  has  been  all  through  my  life  my  fatal 
habit  to  idealise  my  friends  and  to  endow  them  with 
all  sorts  of  qualities  which  they  never  dreamed  of 
possessing,  I  conceived  a  great  and  lasting  affection 
for  this  man ;  and,  when  he  was  in  trouble,  I  fought 
for  him  and  defended  him  through  thick  and  thin 
and  without  any  regard  to  rhyme  or  reason  or  my 
own  interest.  Hence  these  tears!  And  I  am  not 
in  the  least  disposed  to  dispute  that  I  have  only 
myself  to  blame  and  that  it  served  me  very  well 
right.     ''But  this  is  got  by  casting  pearl  to  hogs.'' 


CHAPTER  III 

WILDE  IN  SOCIETY 

IN  view  of  the  curious  anxiety  of  those  who 
support  and  uphold  the  Wilde  legend,  to  paint 
him  for  us  as  a  man  of  fashion  and  social 
position,  it  may  be  interesting  if  I  try  to  recall  Oscar 
Wilde  in  his  figure  as  a  buck  or,  as  we  nowadays 
say,  man  about  town.  There  can  be  no  doubt  what- 
ever that  he  did  really  consider  himself  a  person 
of  fashion  and  social  standing,  outside  of  his  claims 
to  literary  notoriety. 

In  his  writings  he  is  very  fond  of  using  such 
phrases  as  ''men  of  our  rank,"  ''people  of  our  social 
class,"  and  so  forth.  "Rank"  is  a  good  word,  and 
Wilde  knew  perfectly  well  how  to  use  it  in  a  manner 
which  would  lead  people  really  to  believe  that  he 
was  nobly  born.  He  was  able  to  talk  of  his  mother  as 
Lady  Wilde,  and  I  have  heard  him  refer  to  her  in 
certain  company  as  "her  ladyship"  with  great  efifect. 
You  would  imagine  from  his  manner  that  she  was 
a  grande  dame  of  the  first  water,  with  two  or  three 
large  places  to  her  name,  and  retinues  of  servants. 

33 


34  Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

Of  Papa  Wilde  we  did  not  hear  quite  so  frequently, 
probably  for  the  reason  that  he  was  not  "his  lord- 
ship/' At  the  same  time,  Wilde  could  not  have  put 
on  greater  airs  than  he  was  sometimes  wont  to  don 
if  his  father  had  been  a  duke. 

Now,  with  this  feeling  of  "family"  about  him, 
it  is  not  extraordinary  that  he  should  have  tried 
to  live  up  to  it  to  the  best  of  his  lights.  He  opined 
that  if  "a  gentleman  of  rank''  is  to  be  taken  for 
a  gentleman  of  rank,  he  must  not  only  keep  his 
rank  duly  prominent  in  his  conversation,  but  he 
must  also  look,  dress  and,  as  far  as  possible,  live 
the  part.  In  the  matter  of  looks,  Wilde  believed 
in  his  heart  that  he  had  the  "bulge"  of  all  the 
literary  people  of  his  time.  Tennyson  might  wear 
prophetic  robes  and  wideawake  hats,  Swinburne 
might  look  the  decent  little  ginger  gentleman  he  was. 
Pater  might  pass  for  the  profound  and  beetle- 
browed  thinker  on  the  high  arts,  Bernard  Shaw 
might  pass  for  the  bewhiskered  fire-eater,  Arthur 
Symons  for  the  blonde  angel,  Beardsley  for  the 
delicate  spider-legged  artist;  but  when  it  came  to 
nobility  and  beauty  of  features,  Wilde  was  con- 
vinced that  he  had  them  all  "beaten  to  a  frazzle." 
He  was  very  fond  of  likening  himself  to  the  Roman 
Emperors.  He  had  a  big  face,  which  was,  as  he 
himself  put  it,  "delicately  chiselled" ;  and  if  anybody 


Wilde  in  Society  35 

had  asked  him  to  sit  for  a  bust  of  Nero,  he  would 
have  considered  that  person  most  discerning.  I 
remember  him  saying  to  me  that,  while  it  was  con- 
sidered among  ''the  dull  English''  to  be  almost  crim- 
inal for  a  man  to  speak  of  good  looks,  either  in  him- 
self or  in  another  man,  good  looks  were  half  the 
battle  in  society.  Of  course,  I  laughed  and  told  him 
not  to  be  a  fool ;  but  he  meant  it,  all  the  same ;  and 
nothing  would  make  him  angrier  than  the  hint  that 
his  mouth  was  too  large  or  that  his  face  was  spoiled 
by  too  great  an  expanse  of  jowl.  He  took  great 
care  of  his  complexion,  and  I  never  knew  a  man 
who  brushed  his  hair  more  frequently  in  the  day 
than  he  did. 

He  had  a  defect  which  was  the  sorrow  of  his  life 
— the  arts  of  the  dentist  not  being  so  well  under- 
stood then  as  they  are  to-day — but  on  this  I  do  not 
propose  to  dwell. 

I  have  been  astonished  that  the  published  part 
of  ''De  Profundis''  contains  no  touching  and  beauti- 
ful passages  relating  to  clothes ;  and  this  is  all  the 
more  surprising  because,  in  point  of  fact,  Wilde 
was,  to  a  large  extent,  a  tailor's  man.  I  sometimes 
think  that  if  he  had  lived  in  the  present  era  of 
Homburg  hats  and  tweed  suits  he  would  never  have 
been  famous  at  all.  He  began  his  notoriety  by  fan- 
tastic dressing,  but  as  he  ascended  on  the  rungs 


36  Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

of  art  to  the  heaven  of  rank,  his  great  aim  was  for 
what  he  termed  "elegant  correctness."  Hence,  the 
Wilde  of  my  time  consisted,  to  a  great  extent,  of 
silk  hat,  frock  coat,  striped  trousers  and  patent 
leather  boots.  Add  to  these  a  very  tall  clouded  cane 
with  a  heavy  gold  knob  and  a  pair  of  grey  suede 
gloves,  and  you  have  the  outward  man.  On  the 
whole,  I  believe  that  he  loathed  the  get-up,  espe- 
cially in  the  hot  weather,  but  he  stuck  to  it  like  a 
Trojan,  and  nobody  ever  saw  Oscar  Wilde  in  Lon- 
don outside  of  the  regulation  harness  from  eleven 
o'clock  till  seven,  or  outside  of  the  hard  white  shirt 
and  swallow-tails  from  seven-thirty  till  any  time 
you  like  in  the  morning. 

Being  a  Roman,  he  must  do  as  persons  of  rank 
did  in  Rome,  and  he  always  struck  me  as  being 
garbed  in  perpetual  readiness  to  walk  out  or  dine 
out  with  the  duke  or  prince  of  the  blood  who  would 
one  day  surely  be  calling  round  for  him.  He  had 
a  large  turquoise  set  in  diamonds,  which  I  had 
purchased  for  him  in  an  expansive  moment  when 
we  happened  to  be  together  in  a  jeweller's  shop. 
The  occasion  was  his  birthday  and  I  took  him  to 
choose  his  own  present.  His  eye  fell  on  this  sea- 
blue  bauble  in  its  ring  of  brilliants,  and  all  question 
of  trouble  to  the  shopman  was  sunk.  He  wore  this 
ornament  in  his  shirt-front  of  evenings  with  a  truly 


Wilde  in  Society  37 

regal  dignity.  For  myself,  I  used  to  call  it  ''the 
blue  light"  or  the  "Hope-Not" — the  Hope  diamond 
being  at  that  time  very  much  to  the  fore  in  polite 
conversation. 

In  the  country  he  naturally  subsided  into  easier 
habiliments;  but  even  here  he  must  follow  the 
fashion  or  be  a  little  bit  ahead  of  it.  His  suits  and 
caps  must  be  all  of  one  piece,  his  boots  as  worn  by 
''the  nobility  and  gentry"  and  his  general  accoutre- 
ments designed  subtly  to  convey  the  impression  that 
he  owned  at  least  ten  thousand  acres  somewhere 
or  other. 

This  bucolic  perfection  was  entirely  a  social 
affair  with  him,  for  he  was  most  coy  of  being  photo- 
graphed otherwise  than  en  grande  tenue.  In  all 
his  official  photographs,  the  frock  coat,  braided  for 
preference,  or  the  fur  coat,  with  a  suggestion  of  a 
silk  hat  on  a  side  table,  "bear  the  gree." 

The  very  suggestion  of  "literalism"  in  the  matter 
of  appearance  horrified  him.  He  desired  to  pass 
for  a  gentleman,  a  "gentleman  of  rank,"  and  noth- 
ing more.  And  this  he  undoubtedly  succeeded  in 
doing  to  his  own  satisfaction.  In  his  intercourse 
with  the  "highest  in  the  land" — which  was,  to  put 
it  plainly,  of  a  very  occasional  nature — he  always 
seemed  to  me  to  be  a  trifle  strained  and  uneasy.  He 
longed  to  smack  certain  personages  on  the  back, 


38  Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

but  he  never  dared  to  do  it.  With  women  he  suc- 
ceeded a  great  deal  better  than  with  men.  Some- 
how, the  men  made  him  either  very  stiff  or  very 
Hmp.  His  bow  was  wasted  upon  them  and  his  diffi- 
dent attempts  at  epigram  missed  fire.  I  think  that 
women  loved  him  because  he  would  insist  that 
everything  was  ''charming''  or  "exquisite/'  and  be- 
cause, although  he  was  expected  to  talk  brilliantly, 
he  really  did  a  great  deal  of  listening.  Late  in  the 
proceedings,  when  the  buffet  had  done  its  harmless, 
necessary  work,  he  would  open  fire  and  talk  amaz- 
ingly, and  fifteen  to  twenty  women  would  hang  on 
his  words,  doubtless  because  their  hostess  had  told 
them  that  Mr.  Wilde  was  ''so  amusing."  But  the 
men  hung  aloof.  When  he  came  away  Wilde  was 
always  as  eager  to  know  how  he  had  "gone  down," 
as  a  debutante  is  eager  to  be  informed  as  to  the 
figure  she  cut  at  her  first  ball.  If  one  said:  "You 
were  great,  Oscar,"  he  would  glow  with  honest 
pride;  if  one  hummed  a  little,  he  would  be  in  the 
depths  for  a  week.  There  were  women  who  didn't 
admire  him  in  the  least,  and  some  of  them  were  at 
no  pains  to  disguise  the  fact.  Long  before  the 
tongue  of  scandal  took  definite  hold  of  his  name, 
there  were  whispers  that  there  was  something 
wrong  about  him;  and  when  Lady  Blank  referred 


Wilde  in  Society  39 

to  him  in  his  hearing  as  '^that  fellow,"  he  became 
white  with  passion  and  was  with  difficulty  re- 
strained from  making  a  demonstration. 

On  the  whole,  however,  his  social  evenings  were 
a  source  of  joy  and  delight  to  him,  and  he  would 
talk  of  this  or  that  party  for  months  after  it  had 
taken  place,  with  continual  notes  of  gratification 
in  his  voice.  And  when,  as  sometimes  happened, 
he  went  to  the  houses  of  persons  who  were  not 
friends  of  mine,  I  could  make  sure  of  brilliantly 
jewelled  accounts  of  the  high  jinks  and  proceed- 
ings, and  of  the  honour  which  had  been  rendered 
to  him  by  brave  and  fair  alike.  ''Dear  Lady 
So-and-So,''  he  would  say;  ''Ah!  a  charming 
woman,  if  you  like:  came  down  the  staircase  to 
receive  me,  for  all  the  world  like  CEnone  coming 
down  Ida.  And  the  Prime  Minister  was  there,  and 
I  don't  mind  telling  you  that  he  glowered  at  me. 
They  hate  genius,  my  boy.     And  poor  old  Lord 

1  have  never  seen  him  before — looked  to  me 

like  a  waiter.  Extraordinary  that  a  man  of  his 
position  should  look  so  rusty.  However,  I  need 
not  tell  you  that  he  was  very  civil  to  me.''  And 
when  I  asked  him  what  he  meant  by  "rusty,"  he 
said:  "Well,  he  wore  such  extraordinary  clothes." 
The  real  facts  of  the  case  doubtless  were  that  his 
hostess  was  not  beautiful  at  all,  that  the  Prime 


40  Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

Minister  had  not  happened  to  look  his  way,  and 

that,  despite  his  rusty  suit,  old  Lord had  gone 

out  of  his  way  to  meet  rather  profuse  deference 
with  graciousness. 

I  don't  say  that  Wilde  had  no  social  success, 
but  what  he  had  was  of  that  curious  kind  which 
is  here  to-day  and  forgotten  to-morrow,  and  his 
reports  of  it  were  always  slightly  exaggerated.  It 
was  on  such  a  slender  basis  that  he  built  up  the 
fabric  of  wonder  and  splendour  with  regard  to 
"rank"  which  he  afterwards  spread  out  for  us  in 
Reading  gaol.  Throughout,  he  draws  a  great  line 
between  "the  poor  thieves  and  outcasts  with  whom 
I  now  associate"  and  "people  of  our  rank'' — never 
"people  of  our  intellect,"  never  "people  of  our  cul- 
ture." He  tells  us  that  in  prison  he  became  a  great 
individualist,  and  apparently  it  was  in  prison  that 
he  became  a  great  aristocrat. 

In  one  passage  in  the  published  "De  Profundis" 
he  actually  uses  the  words  "I  had  inherited  a  noble 
name."  One  need  not  grudge  him  these  tender  illu- 
sions, and,  in  a  way,  there  is  something  rather 
pathetic  about  them.  But  their  encouragement  was 
so  entirely  characteristic  of  the  man  that  it  is 
impossible  to  avoid  a  reference  to  them  in  a  truthful 
portrait.  That  Wilde  did  not  happen  to  be  nobly 
born  is  certainly  nothing  to  his  discredit;  that  he 


Wilde  in  Society  41 

should  have  persistently  pretended  to  noble  birth 
is,  on  the  other  hand,  fairly  contemptible,  especially 
as  in  his  efforts  to  live  up  to  the  part  he  had  allotted 
to  himself  he  invariably  succeeded  in  behaving  in 
an  eminently  unaristocratic  manner.  He  lacked  a 
kind  heart  just  as  surely  as  he  lacked  a  coronet,  and 
Norman  blood  was  as  alien  to  him  as  simple  faith. 


CHAPTER  IV 

THE  LORD  OF  LANGUAGE 

I  AM  not  sure  that  this  chapter  is  headed  in 
quite  the  way  that  Oscar  Wilde's  adherents 
would  like  it  to  be.  When  he  wished  to  seem 
particularly  important,  Wilde  was  wont  to  describe 
himself,  not  only  as  a  Lord  of  Language,  but  as  the 
King  of  Life.  His  claims  to  these  magniloquent 
titles  have  been  suffered  to  pass  unquestioned  by  his 
critics,  and  unassailed  even  by  his  enemies.  The 
coterie  of  long-haired  persons  who  weep  at  the  men- 
tion of  "dear  Oscar's''  name  and  hold  him  up  for  a 
saint  and  a  martyr,  naturally  take  pride  in  his  own 
description  of  himself,  and  will  no  doubt  consider 
it  remiss  of  me  to  leave  out  one  of  them  from  this 
chapter  heading.  The  King  of  Life  business  has 
always  appeared  to  me  to  have  been  settled  at  the 
Old  Bailey,  and  since  such  a  title  as  the  Lord  of 
Language  is  plainly  literary  in  its  bearings,  I  sup- 
pose I  am  free  to  discuss  it  from  the  literary  point 
of  view.  And  I  must  state  at  the  outset  that  I  am 
not  concerned  to  deal  with  Wilde  in  other  than  a 
reasonable,  critical  spirit.    If  his  fame  and  writings 

42 


The  Lord  of  Language  43 

had  been  left  to  themselves  instead  of  becoming 
the  subject  of  attentions  on  the  part  of  over-zealous 
log-rollers  on  the  one  hand  and  catch-penny  scandal- 
mongers on  the  other,  Wilde  would,  in  the  nature 
of  things,  have  attained  to  his  proper  position  in 
literary  history  and  to  his  proper  status  as  an 
author.  As  it  is,  I  maintain  that  the  current  views 
about  his  character  and  his  writings  are  exag- 
gerated and  even  preposterous — views  very  far 
ahead  of  the  true  facts  and,  in  a  large  measure, 
opposed  to  what  Wilde  himself  would  have  wished. 
Practically  everybody  nowadays  who  writes  for 
pleasure  or  for  profit  about  Oscar  Fingall  OTlaher- 
tie  Wills  Wilde  has  taken  him  for  granted  as  a  sort 
of  literary  and  artistic  aristocrat  who  had  a  natural 
right  to  the  best  of  life  and  for  whom  all  beauty 
and  delicacy  were  created.  One  of  the  most  recent 
of  his  biographers  says:  "Wilde  provides  us  with 
the  rare  spectacle  of  a  man  most  of  whose  powers 
are  those  of  a  spectator,  a  connoisseur,  a  man  for 
whom  pictures  are  painted  and  books  written,  the 
perfect  elaborator  for  whom  the  artist  hopes  in  his 
heart."  I  have  never  seen  a  fault  of  taste,  a  fault 
of  judgment  or  a  fault  of  intellect  attributed  to 
him.  Even  his  vices  are  held  up  to  us  as  having 
been  necessary  to  the  development  of  his  chartered 
and  immaculate  soul,  and  as  having  contributed 


44  Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

and  been  necessary  to  the  perfection  of  his  work. 
Greater  bunkum  was  never  propagated.  Wilde  was 
far  from  being  in  any  sense  a  perfervid  worshipper 
of  the  beautiful.  To  suggest  that  beauty  was  all  in 
all  for  him  is  to  suggest  what  is  not  true.  He  was 
never  content  that  other  people  should  write  fine 
poetry  or  fine  prose  for  him  to  admire,  his  sole 
ambition  being  to  write  fine  things  himself — ^not 
especially  for  the  fine  thing's  sake,  but  for  the  sake 
of  being  able  to  pose  as  the  one  great  and  superior 
person  in  all  the  world.  It  is  not  to  Wilde's  dis- 
credit, perhaps,  that  he  praised  but  little  or,  as  one 
might  say,  frugally.  There  was  nobody  of  his  time 
who  greatly  required  to  be  praised.  He  professed 
the  stock  admiration  for  Tennyson,  Swinburne, 
Meredith  and  Pater;  but  when  he  expressed  it — 
which  was  seldom — it  was  always  with  the  reserva- 
tion that  of  the  five  he  himself  was  the  greatest. 
There  were  occasions,  of  course,  when  he  could  be 
adulatory,  and  even  obsequious ;  but  this  was  either 
to  dead  men  or  to  those  of  his  contemporaries  who 
were  engaged  in  arts  with  which  he  was  not  con- 
cerned as  a  practitioner.  His  sonnets  to  Miss  Ellen 
Terry  and  the  late  Henry  Irving  may  stand  for  his 
monument  in  this  special  line.  As  to  artists  paint- 
ing pictures  for  him,  and  so  forth,  the  great  quarrel 
of  his  life  was  with  Whistler,  from  whom  he  de- 


The  Lord  of  Language  45 

rived  practically  everything  that  he  affected  to 
know  about  art  and  whose  work  he  believed  to  be 
'Vastly  overrated/'  Of  pictures  in  their  relation 
to  beauty  he  had  little  or  no  appreciation.  Just  as 
the  far-famed  blue  china  at  Oxford  was  valuable 
to  him  because  he  could  make  mots  over  it  and  get 
himself  talked  about,  so  all  his  views  and  his  ex- 
pressions of  opinion  with  respect  to  art  were  not 
the  views  and  opinions  of  the  person  who  loves  and 
knows  art,  but  were  designed  to  illustrate  his  own 
singularity  or  superiority,  or  to  support  a  pose.  In 
spite  of  all  he  wrote  and  said  on  the  subject,  and  in 
spite  of  all  that  has  been  said  and  written  by  his 
admirers,  there  is  nothing  of  Wilde  that  persists 
in  criticism  on  the  art  side  which  is  not  to  be  found 
in  Whistler's  'Ten  o'clock,"  or  which  he  had  not 
gleaned  either  from  his  contemporaries  or  from 
the  older  writers  on  the  literary  side.  In  order 
to  show  more  clearly  what  I  mean,  let  us  take  the 
preface  to  ''Dorian  Gray,"  which,  as  is  well  known, 
consists  of  a  number  of  aphorisms  concerning  art 
and  criticism  as  Wilde  is  supposed  to  have  believed 
in  them.     I  quote  some  of  them: — 

The  artist  is  the  creator  of  beautiful  things. 

To  reveal  art  and  conceal  the  artist  is  art's 
aim. 


46  Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

The  critic  is  he  who  can  translate  into  another 
manner  or  a  new  material  his  impression  of 
beautiful  things. 
The  highest,  as  the  lowest,  form  of  criticism 
is  a  mode  of  autobiography. 

Those  who  find  ugly  meanings  in  beautiful  things 
are  corrupt  without  being  charming.  This 
is  a  fault. 
Those  who  find  beautiful  meanings  in  beauti- 
ful things  are  the  cultivated.  For  these 
there  is  hope. 

They  are  the  elect  to  whom  beautiful  things  mean 
only  beauty. 
There  is  no  such  thing  as  a  moral  or  an  im- 
moral book.    Books  are  well  written  or  badly 
written.    That  is  all. 

The  nineteenth-century  dislike  of  realism  is  the 
rage  of  Caliban  seeing  his  own  face  in  a 
glass. 
The  nineteenth-century  dislike  of  romanticism 
is  the  rage  of  Caliban  not  seeing  his  own 
face  in  a  glass. 

The  moral  life  of  man  forms  part  of  the  subject- 
matter  of  the  artist,  but  the  morality  of 
art  consists  in  the  perfect  use  of  an  imperfect 
medium. 


The  Lord  of  Language  47 

No  artist  desires  to  prove  anything.  Even  things 
that  are  true  can  be  proved. 

Thought  and  language  are  to  the  artist  instru- 
ments of  an  art. 
Vice  and  virtue  are  to  the  artist  materials  for 
an  art. 

From  the  point  of  view  of  form,  the  type  of  all 
the  arts  is  the  art  of  the  musician.  From 
the  point  of  view  of  feeling,  the  actor's  craft 
is  the  type. 

It  is  the  spectator  and  not  life  that  art  really 
mirrors. 
Diversity  of  opinion  about  a  work  of  art  shows 

that  the  work  is  new,  complex  and  vital. 
When  critics  disagree  the  artist  is  in  accord 
with  himself. 

We  can  forgive  a  man  for  making  a  useful  thing 
as  long  as  he  does  not  admire  it.    The  only 
excuse  for  making  a  useless  thing  is  that 
one  admires  it  intensely. 
All  art  is  quite  useless. 

These  remarks  have  been  held  up  to  us  as  Wilde's 
credo,  and  slight  and  few  though  they  be,  it  is  the 
fact  that  they  do  really  epitomise  what  some  people 
call  his  ''teaching."  One  has  only  to  glance  at 
them,  however,  to  perceive  that  without  exception 


48  Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

they  are  either  obvious  or  perverted  truisms  or  the 
merest  glosses  on  quite  hoary  critical  adages.  For 
example,  "The  artist  is  the  creator  of  beautiful 
things"  must  have  been  said  at  least  a  thousand 
times  before  Wilde  suddenly  rushed  upon  the  world 
with  it  as  a  new  and  marvellous  discovery.  "To 
reveal  art  and  conceal  the  artist  is  art's  aim"  is  a 
very  cheap  variant  of  the  saying  that  language  was 
invented  to  conceal  one's  thoughts,  or  Horace's  old 
tag:  ''Ars  est  celare  artem,"  "The  highest  and 
lowest  form  of  criticism  is  a  form  of  autobiog- 
raphy" is  merely  to  say  what  was  said  by  Rousseau 
— namely:  that  all  writing  is  in  essence  autobio- 
graphical; while  "It  is  the  spectator  and  not  life, 
that  art  really  mirrors"  is  merely  Shakespeare's 
"Beauty  is  in  the  eye  of  the  beholder,"  clumsily 
rendered.  All  the  talk  about  there  being  no  such 
thing  as  a  moral  or  an  immoral  book,  and  about 
art  being  quite  useless,  is  the  merest  perversion  and 
fiddle-de-dee,  as  anybody  who  is  not  in  the  last  stage 
of  idiocy  will  perceive  for  himself. 

I  maintain  that  this  statement  of  Wilde — which, 
by  the  way,  did  not  originally  appear  as  a  preface 
to  "Dorian  Gray,"  but  was  painfully  and  carefully 
compiled  when  its  author  was  at  the  height  of  his 
achievement  and  wished  to  pontificate — shows  us 
clearly  the  nature  of  the  man's  mind,  which  was  a 


The  Lord  of  Language  49 

shallow  and  comparatively  feeble  mind,  incapable 
of  grappling  unaided  with  even  moderately  pro- 
found things,  and  disposed  to  fribble  and  antic  with 
old  thoughts  for  lack  of  power  to  evolve  new  ones. 
It  was  a  mind  which  was  continually  discovering 
with  a  glow  that  two  and  two  make  four,  or  pre- 
tending to  discover  with  a  much  warmer  glow  that 
two  and  two  make  five.  In  every  scrap  that  he 
wrote,  leaving  out,  of  course,  the  poems,  you  will 
find  this  feeble,  mediocre,  but,  withal,  vain-glorious 
instrument  hard  at  work  on  the  fearful  business  of 
saying  nothing  in  such  a  way  that  foolish  people 
will  shout  about  it. 

Wilde  knew  himself  for  a  shallow  and  oblique 
thinker.  The  fact  that  he  never  did  anything  really 
great  has  been  set  down  to  his  indolence.  It  was 
due  really  to  shallowness  rather  than  indolence. 
When  he  found  that  nobody  would  read  his  poetry, 
he  became  most  indolent  about  the  writing  of 
verses  and  complained  that  there  was  nothing  for 
a  poet  of  his  eminence  to  write  about.  When  he 
found  that  people  would  listen  to  lectures  written  on 
a  basis  of  Whistler  and  William  Morris,  he  wrote 
and  delivered  such  lectures  with  an  industry  worthy 
of  the  best  of  causes.  And  when  he  found  actor- 
managers  who  would  produce  money  "on  account'' 
for  such  drama  as  ''Lady  Windermere's  Fan"  and 


50  Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

such  comedy  as  ^The  Importance  of  being  Ear- 
nest," he  wrote  plays  till  the  sweat  fairly  rolled  off 
him.  But  he  was  conscious,  as  every  unbiassed  con- 
temporary critic  was  conscious,  that  he  ran  very 
far  short  of  the  achievement  of  which  he  was  wont 
to  plume  himself,  and  he  knew  that  when  it  came 
to  serious  things  he  was  always  considered  more 
or  less  of  a  dabbler. 

Like  most  Irishmen,  he  was  troubled  all  his  life 
with  attacks  of  regret  which  he  was  accustomed 
to  call  remorse.  He  believed  that  he  had  supreme 
gifts  and  that  he  had  squandered  them;  he  never 
could  see  that  it  was  impossible  that  a  man  who 
pretended,  as  he  pretended,  could  ever  have  had 
supreme  gifts.  His  remorse  over  the  squandering 
of  these  alleged  gifts  was  at  times  ludicrous  to 
behold.  He  would  bemoan  his  wasted  life  and  come 
very  nigh  shedding  tears  about  his  shallowness  at 
two  o'clock  in  the  morning ;  while  at  one  o'clock  the 
same  day  he  would  be  swallowing  ortolans  as  if 
they  were  oysters  and  swearing  over  some  silly 
liqueur  that  he  was  the  greatest  genius  that  ever 
lived. 

In  time,  this  notion  of  shallowness  became  an 
obsession  with  him.  He  makes  constant  use  of  the 
word  "shallow"  in  his  writings,  and  right  through 
'*De  Profundis"  you  find  him  crying  "the  supreme 


The  Lord  of  Language  51 

vice  is  shallowness,"  in  and  out  of  season,  and  with- 
out the  remotest  reference  to  the  context.  Of 
course,  if  we  endeavour  to  look  into  the  psychology 
of  the  situation,  we  perceive  clearly  that  it  was  im- 
possible for  a  man  of  Wilde's  type  to  do  any  really 
big  work,  and  he  certainly  never  did  do  it.  His 
claims  to  be  considered  as  a  "Lord  of  Language'' 
will  not  bear  looking  into.  He  wrote  passable  verse 
and  competent  prose,  but  he  wrote  no  better  verse 
and  no  better  prose  than  several  other  men  of  his 
time  whose  writings  are  more  or  less  forgotten. 
We  have  it  on  the  statement  of  Mr.  Justice  Darling 
that  Wilde  could  ''conjure  with  words."  I  should 
like  chapter  and  verse  for  any  verbal  conjuring 
which  can  be  considered  worth  remembering,  or 
which,  for  that  matter,  is  remembered.  I  think 
that  all  Wilde  did  for  the  English  language  was  to 
degrade,  abuse  or  make  ridiculous  such  words  as 
"exquisite,"  "wonderful,"  "charming,"  "delight- 
ful," "delicate,"  and  so  forth.  He  bored  me  to 
death  at  times  with  his  "How  perfectly  wonderful 
of  you!"  while  his  "charming  fellows"  and  "charm- 
ing ladies,"  "delicious  dishes,"  "exquisite  liqueurs" 
and  general  ecstatics  were  like  sands  on  the  sea 
where  the  blue  wave  rolls  nightly.  He  was  plagued 
with  the  Irishman's  propensity  to  muddle  his 
"shalls"  and  "wills,"  and  I  found  hi  him  an  utter 


52  Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

incapacity  to  understand  or  appreciate,  in  the  lit- 
erary sense,  certain  plain  English  idioms  with 
which  any  man  possessed  of  a  feeling  for  language 
would  never  have  had  the  slightest  trouble.  I  re- 
member having  a  lengthy  and  fearful  argument 
with  him  over  Shakespeare's  use  of  the  word  ''your" 
in  such  phrases  as  "your  tanner  will  last  you  eleven 
years."  He.could  understand  neither  the  force  nor 
the  sense  of  such  usages  and,  though  he  "tumbled" 
in  the  end,  he  was  a  fearful  time  about  it.  One  does 
not  expect  such  dullness  in  a  Lord  of  Language. 


CHAPTER  V 

OUR  MUTUAL  FRIENDS 

ACCORDING  to  the  Ransome  book— the 
biographical  details  in  which,  its  author 
-  admits,  have  been  checked  by  Mr.  Robert 
Ross — Oscar  Wilde  was  the  son  of  William  Wilde, 
''knighted  in  1864,  a  celebrated  oculist  and  aurist, 
a  man  of  great  intellectuality  and  uncertain  temper, 
a  runner  after  girls,  with  a  lusty  enjoyment  of  life, 
and  a  delight  in  falling  stars  and  thunderstorms/' 
This  is  an  ingenious  way  of  presenting  a  de- 
cidedly dubious  and  unpleasing  character  to  an  awe- 
stricken  world.  Wilde's  father  was  certainly  a 
knight;  but  heaven  alone  knows  who  his  grand- 
father was.  It  is  also  to  be  noted  that  while  Sir 
William  Wilde  may  have  died  "a  celebrated  oculist 
and  aurist,"  he  began  life  as  an  apothecary,  and  for 
years  kept  a  chemist's  shop  in  an  obscure  part  of 
Dublin.  The  ''runner  after  girls"  admission  on 
the  part  of  Messrs.  Ransome  and  Ross  is  also  very 
touching,  seeing  that  William  Wilde  had  once  been 
prosecuted  for  insulting  a  lady  patient  and  that 

53 


54  Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

everybody  knows  the  story  of  Wilde's  father  and 
the  witty  veterinary  surgeon  who  ralHed  him  on  the 
subject  with  one  of  the  sharpest  bits  of  sarcasm 
that  ever  fell  from  a  man's  mouth. 

It  is  perhaps  necessary  for  me  to  say  here  that 
I  have  never  in  my  life  laid  any  great  stress  upon 
the  advantages  of  birth.  If  a  man's  manners  and 
disposition  are  all  right,  I  am  not  greatly  concerned 
to  know  that  his  father  drove  pigs  or  got  locked 
up  for  stealing  spoons.  At  the  same  time,  I  have 
never  been  able  to  repress  feelings  of  amused  con- 
tempt for  that  numerous  body  of  persons  who,  hav- 
ing no  ancestry  or  forbears  to  speak  of,  make  a 
point  of  proclaiming  themselves  to  be  persons  of 
family,  and  invent  all  manner  of  legends  to  support 
their  supposed  exalted  birth. 

In  the  case  of  Wilde,  it  is  due  to  him  to  say  that 
he  kept  his  parentage  and  extraction  fairly  in  the 
background  so  far  as  I  was  concerned.  He  ad- 
mitted that  he  belonged  to  the  Irish  middle  classes 
and  prided  himself  on  having  risen  to  academic 
honour,  not  with  the  help  of  money,  but  by  sheer 
force  of  intellect.  This  was  in  the  early  days  of 
our  acquaintance.  Ultimately,  when  he  had  man- 
aged to  get  out  of  the  rut  of  bohemianism  and  to 
find  his  way  into  respectable  society,  he  began  to 
conceive  himself  in  the  light  of  a  very  great  social 


Our  Mutual  Friends  55 

figure,  and  it  was  easy  for  him  to  suppose  that  he 
was  a  born  member  of  the  aristocracy  and  that  all 
his  people  belonged  to  what  Burke,  I  believe,  calls 
'The  titled  landed  and  official  classes."  I  used  to 
smile  at  these  pretensions  and  joke  with  him  about 
them ;  and  he  would  admit  that  he  was  foolish.  But 
the  fact  remains  that  to  the  end  of  his  life  he  kept 
up  the  legend  of  his  high  birth  and  connections,  and 
was  eager  always  to  pass  himself  off  as  a  great 
gentleman. 

His  biographers  have  taken  up  the  wondrous  tale 
and,  without  saying  so  in  as  many  words,  they  lead 
the  polite  world  of  Wilde  worshippers  to  believe 
that  their  saint  was  what  the  young  lady  called  "a 
gentleman  in  his  own  right."  The  Wildes  ''were 
people  of  consideration  in  Dublin,"  says  the  zealous 
Mr.  Ransome:  "his  school- fellows  did  not  have  to 
ask  Wilde  who  his  father  was."  Well,  possibly  they 
didn't — for  very  different  reasons  than  those  Mr. 
Ransome  would  have  us  conjure  up.  Down  to  the 
time  of  my  first  meeting  Wilde,  he  had  never  had 
any  real  footing  in  society  and,  though  he  fought 
for  it  desperately  during  the  period  of  our  friend- 
ship, I  doubt  if  he  ever  really  got  it.  He  was  too 
obviously  the  tuft-hunter  and  the  snob  ever  to  be 
liked  by  the  people  for  whose  acquaintance  he 
sighed.    I  never  could  see  why  a  man  of  his  talents 


56  Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

and  mode  of  life  should  have  been  so  desperately 
anxious  to  be  "hail  fellow  well  met"  with  some  of 
the  dullest  and  silliest  people  in  the  world ;  but  there 
can  be  no  doubt  that  he  dearly  loved  a  lord  and 
would  put  up  with  a  great  deal  of  pain  and  incon- 
venience on  the  mere  chance  of  a  casual  word  or 
two  with  a  duchess.  When  our  acquaintance  began 
he  knew  nobody,  and,  though  his  name  was  in  the 
papers  and  his  picture  turned  up  from  time  to  time 
in  Punch,  you  never  saw  him  at  the  places  where  he 
would  have  given  his  soul  to  be.  He  told  me  that 
at  Magdalen  he  had  managed  to  get  on  terms  with 
an  unmarried  duke,  but  before  this  beam  of  sun- 
shine had  shone  upon  him  for  a  year  or  two,  the 
duke  incontinently  married  and  the  duchess  inter- 
vened and  put  an  end  to  the  intimacy. 

Wilde's  own  set  of  friends  and  acquaintances 
struck  one  as  being  a  peculiar  assemblage;  but  he 
assured  me  that  they  were  great  and  charming 
people  and  that  they  were  all  on  the  high  road  to 
eminence  and  fame ;  and,  being  young  and  unversed 
in  the  world's  ways,  I  took  him  at  his  word  and  set 
down  my  incapacity  to  appreciate  his  immediate 
entourage  to  my  own  dullness  and  lack  of  pers- 
picacity. The  first  stars  in  the  firmament  of  charm- 
ing fellows  and  world-compelling  geniuses  brought 
to  me  by  Wilde  were  Mr.  Robert  Ross  and  Mr. 


33 
o 


g  2 

m 

H 
-*! 
O 


Our  Mutual  Friends  57 

Reggie  Turner.  According  to  the  allegations 
brought  against  me  at  the  Ransome  trial,  when 
Wilde  entertained  these  gentlemen  at  dinner  he  did 
it  in  Soho  and  with  the  help  of  a  shilling  bottle  of 
Medoc ;  whereas  when  I,  Lord  Alfred  Douglas,  was 
his  guest,  it  was  always  at  Willis's  rooms  and  to 
the  accompaniment  of  specially  imported  pates 
from  Strasbourg  and  priceless  champagnes.  In 
point  of  fact,  all  four  of  us  drank  a  good  many 
humble  whiskies  and  sodas  at  the  Cafe  Royal  and 
dined  and  lunched  at  the  same  place  without  any 
great  effusions  of  money  on  anybody's  part.  Wilde 
was  a  doughty  and  assiduous  trencherman.  I  would 
have  backed  him  to  eat  the  head  off  a  brewer's  dray- 
man three  times  a  day,  and  his  capacity  for  whisky 
and  soda  knew  no  bounds.  The  marvel  of  it  was 
that  he  never  became  really  drunk,  though  from 
four  o'clock  in  the  afternoon  till  three  in  the  morn- 
ing he  was  never  really  sober.  The  more  he  drank 
the  more  he  talked,  and  without  whisky  he  could 
neither  talk  nor  write. 

After  Messrs.  Ross  and  Turner,  Wilde  brought 
along  the  late  Ernest  Dowson,  who,  for  some  reason 
or  other,  seemed  scared  out  of  his  wits;  Mr.  Max 
Beerbohm,  who  giggled  prettily  at  everything  either 
Wilde  or  I  said;  and  Mr.  Frank  Harris,  who  wore 
the  same  costly  furs  and  roared  in  the  same  sucking- 


58  Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

dove  way  as  still  continues  to  delight  his  troops  of 
friends.  They  were  a  merry  and,  I  am  afraid,  a 
rather  careless  company.  They  talked  art,  poetry 
and  politics ;  none  of  them  seemed  to  have  much  to 
do,  though  I  believe  all  of  them  were  fairly  busy 
men  and,  on  the  whole,  they  were  pleasant  enough 
people  to  meet. 

Gradually,  however,  the  acquaintance  between 
myself  and  Wilde  began  to  strengthen  and  become 
more  intimate.  I  took  him  to  my  mother's  place 
near  Ascot  and  introduced  him  to  a  good  many 
people  whom  he  considered  to  be  important.  He 
met  my  cousin,  George  Wyndham,  who,  I  believe, 
asked  him  down  afterwards  to  Clouds,  and,  at  his 
very  special  request,  I  introduced  him  to  my 
brother.  Viscount  Drumlanrig,  at  that  time  a  Lord- 
in- Waiting  to  Queen  Victoria.  No  two  men  could 
have  less  in  common  than  Drumlanrig  and  Wilde. 
On  one  hand  you  had  a  soldier  and  a  sportsman, 
with  perhaps  a  bit  of  the  courtier  thrown  in;  on 
the  other  hand  you  had  the  overdressed  Bohemian, 
with  his  hair  nicely  parted  and  very  anxious  to  be 
friendly  and  charming.  My  brother  was  amused 
and,  though  they  did  not  meet  more  than  three 
times,  it  was  years  before  Wilde  ceased  to  talk 
pompously  of  "my  friend.  Lord  Drumlanrig,  Lord- 
in-Waiting  to  Her  Majesty."     I  also  introduced 


Our  Mutual  Friends  59 

him  to  my  grandfather,  Mr.  Alfred  Montgomery, 
who  took  a  violent  and  invincible  dislike  to  him 
and  declined  to  meet  him  again. 

In  addition  to  the  people  I  have  mentioned,  Wilde 
always  had  on  hand  a  sort  of  job  line  of  weird  and 
wonderful  acquaintances  whose  names  were  for 
ever  on  his  lips  and  whose  possessions — intellectual 
and  otherwise — were  supposed  to  be  fabulous.  He 
would  come  a  few  minutes  late  for  lunch  and  beg 
to  be  excused  for  unpunctuality.  "The  fact  of  the 
matter  is,"  he  would  say,  "I  have  spent  a  most  de- 
lightful morning  with  my  dear  friend,  Mr.  Balsam 
Bassy — a  charming  fellow  with  a  face  like  a  Michel 
Angelo  drawing  and  a  mind  like  Benvenuto  Cellini. 
I  would  have  brought  him  in  to  lunch — he  is  dying 
to  make  your  acquaintance — but  he  has  to  go  down 
to  his  uncle's  place  in  Devonshire  and  couldn't  miss 
the  two-fifty  on  any  account."  There  would  fol- 
low a  long  and  highly  elaborate  statement  of  Mr. 
Balsam  Bassy's  many  gifts,  graces  and  accomplish- 
ments, his  wonderful  powers  of  conversation,  the 
exquisite  mots  he  perpetrated,  and  the  charming 
poetry  that  he  could  write  if  he  would  only  take 
the  trouble  to  live  his  own  life  instead  of  frivolling 
it  away  in  the  highest  circles.  Wilde  had,  to  my 
knowledge,  at  least  half  a  dozen  ''Balsam  Bassys" 
going  at  one  time  and,  though  I  only  saw  one  of 


60  Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

them  in  the  flesh,  I  believe  they  were  real  persons, 
and  that  Wilde  believed  all  he  had  invented  about 
them.  The  solitary  ''Balsam  Bassy"  he  produced 
on  an  occasion  when  he  could  not  help  himself, 
as  the  man  sailed  right  into  us  at  supper,  turned 
out  to  be  a  very  mild  and  inoffensive  gentleman 
who  possessed  an  allowance  of  two  hundred  and 
fifty  pounds  a  year  from  his  uncle,  a  brewer,  but 
with  no  more  talent — let  alone  genius — than  a  box 
of  matches.  When  I  observed  to  Wilde  that  this 
particular  Mr.  Balsam  Bassy  did  not  seem  quite 
to  come  up  to  expectations,  he  became  very  angry 
and  said  that  the  fact  that  Mr.  Balsam  Bassy  was 
his  friend  was  a  sufficient  passport  for  him  to  any 
society.  I  said  that  I  thought  it  was,  and  there 
the  matter  dropped. 

The  large  number  of  persons  of  eminence  whom 
Wilde  knew  in  a  casual  way  would,  of  course,  make 
a  long  list,  but  of  his  friends  and  intimates — the 
people  who,  so  to  say,  gyrated  immediately  around 
him — I  have  given  a  full  account.  It  should  be 
added  that  Wilde  knew  Beardsley,  whom  he  was 
disposed  to  patronise,  and  Mr.  George  Bernard 
Shaw,  who  was  then  a  writer  on  the  Star.  Of  Shaw 
he  had  a  high  opinion  and  prophesied  for  him  a 
future  in  a  walk  of  life  far  other  than  the  one  in 
which  he  has  succeeded.    Probably  if  he  had  never 


Our  Mutual  Friends  61 

known  Shaw  he  would  never  have  written  the  ''Soul 
of  Man."  While  Shaw's  socialism  was  a  very  much 
redder  and  more  blatant  affair  in  those  days  than 
it  is  now,  it  attracted  Wilde  because  it  was  odd  and 
Shaw  was  Irish.  Though  a  mild  Liberal  by  pre- 
tension, Wilde  was  always  a  rebel  in  his  heart. 
''Down  with  everything  that's  up  and  up  with 
everything  that's  down"  was  his  intellectual  motto. 
If  he  had  not  met  Shaw  he  would  probably  have 
kept  his  views  about  the  social  order  of  things  to 
himself.  Shaw  helped  him  to  a  species  of  socialism 
which  looks  very  revolutionary  but  which  is  really 
designed  to  benefit  the  rich  rather  than  the  poor. 
Like  pretty  well  everything  else  that  Wilde  wrote, 
"The  Soul  of  Man  under  Socialism"  fails  entirely 
when  you  come  to  look  into  it.  It  is  neither  fish, 
flesh,  fowl  nor  good  red  herring,  and  its  main  argu- 
ment— namely,  that  human  beings  will  never  be 
happy  tiir  they  have  got  rid  of  altruism — is,  of 
course,  the  obvious  reverse  of  the  truth. 

It  may  be  that  the  account  I  have  given  of  Wilde's 
circle  will  come  with  a  shock  of  disappointment  to 
those  who  have  been  accustomed  to  the  Ross- 
Ransome-Sherard  versions  as  to  his  mode  of  life. 
The  absence  of  distinguished  names  is  certainly 
conspicuous.  But  as  I  am  writing  the  truth  and 
not  a  fairy  story,  I  am  compelled  to  stick  to  the 


62  Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

actual  facts,  which  are  that  Wilde,  during  all  the 
time  I  knew  him,  was  not  on  terms  of  anything  like 
intimacy  with  any  of  the  distinguished  people  of 
his  day.  He  was  continually  talking  of  his  various 
eminent  contemporaries  as  if  he  were  on  terms  of 
friendship  with  them;  he  constantly  referred  to 
Edward  Burne- Jones,  to  William  Morris,  to  Ruskin, 
to  Meredith,  to  Tennyson,  Swinburne,  Browning 
and  the  rest;  and  he  referred  to  them  always  as  if 
he  had  at  one  time  been  most  friendly  with  them. 
Whether  this  were  or  were  not  the  case  I  have  no 
means  of  settling  authoritatively :  I  can  only  speak 
of  the  period  of  his  life  during  which  I  knew  him 
and  was  continually  in  his  society — namely,  from 
the  year  1892  to  the  time  of  his  death — and  I  say 
positively  that  during  the  whole  of  that  time  he 
never  had  the  slightest  intercourse  with  any  of  the 
persons  mentioned.  I  believe  Wilde  had  at  one  time 
a  slight  acquaintance  with  Burne- Jones ;  but  on  two 
occasions  when  I  myself  met  the  latter  at  Clouds, 
the  country  house  of  my  uncle,  the  late  Mr.  Percy 
Wyndham,  I  never  heard  him  mention  Wilde's 
name.  I  believe  he  knew  Ruskin  at  Oxford,  but 
only  in  the  way  in  which  any  undergraduate  could 
know  him  if  he  wished  to  do  so.  Browning  he  had 
met  once  or  twice,  and  the  same  applies  to  Meredith. 
I  do  not  believe  that  he  ever  saw  or,  at  any  rate. 


Our  Mutual  Friends  63 

spoke  either  to  Tennyson  or  Swinburne.  Yet  to 
hear  him  talk  of  all  these  people  one  would  have 
supposed  that  he  was  a  regular  member  of  their 
circle.  When  I  was  with  Wilde,  before  his  down- 
fall and  imprisonment  I  accepted  all  he  told  me 
as  to  his  friendship  with  the  intellectual  giants  of 
his  time  as  gospel  truth,  and  it  was  not  till  long 
afterwards  that  it  struck  me  as  curious  that  we 
never  came  across  any  of  these  celebrities;  that 
Wilde  was  never  able  to  get  one  of  them  to  come 
to  his  house,  and  never  by  any  chance  went  to  see 
them  at  theirs. 

A  good  example  of  Wilde's  pushfulness  in  this 
line  of  pretended  intimacy  with  celebrated  people 
is  furnished  by  the  terms  of  his  dedication  of  one 
of  his  plays :  'To  the  dear  memory  of  Robert,  Earl 
of  Lytton.''  I  have  it  on  the  authority  of  Mr. 
Neville  Lytton,  the  younger  son  of  the  late  Lord 
Lytton,  that  his  father  scarcely  knew  Wilde,  and 
had  only  met  him  on  one  or  two  occasions,  and  that 
he  might  or  might  not  have  been  flattered  by 
Wilde's  dedication.  The  same  applies  to  his  sup- 
posed French  acquaintance.  According  to  Wilde's 
own  account,  he  knew  everybody  in  France  who  was 
worth  knowing,  but,  as  a  fact,  he  had  only  the 
very  slightest  knowledge  of  a  few  of  them,  derived 
from  meeting  them  once  or  twice  at  luncheon  or 


64  Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

dinner-parties  at  the  time  he  wrote  his  play 
^'Salome."  This  question  is  settled  by  the  articles 
which  have  appeared  on  the  subject  in  France  by 
M.  Henri  de  Regnier  and  the  Vicomte  d'Humieres. 
After  he  left  prison,  of  course  nobody  knew  him, 
but  at  the  very  height  of  his  fame  and  success  the 
facts  were  as  I  have  stated.  The  same  applies  to 
social  as  opposed  to  literary  and  artistic  lights. 
When  I  was  twenty-three  years  of  age  I  was  elected 
to  an  institution  called  the  Crabbet  Club,  which  had 
been  founded  by  my  cousin,  Mr.  Wilfrid  Blunt. 
The  club  met  once  a  year  at  Mr.  Wilfrid  Blunt's 
country  house,  Crabbet  Park,  for  the  purpose  of 
playing  lawn-tennis  and  reading  poems  composed 
by  the  members  of  the  club  for  a  prize.  Among  the 
members  of  the  club  were  George  Curzon — now 
Lord  Curzon  of  Kedlestone — George  Wyndham, 
George  Leveson-Gower — then  Comptroller  of  the 
Queen's  Household:  the  'Trinity  of  Georges,"  as 
some  one  called  them  in  a  prize  poem ;  Lord  Hough- 
ton, now  Lord  Crewe,  Mr.  Harry  Cust,  Mr.  God- 
frey Webb,  Mr.  Mark  Napier,  the  late  Lord  Cairns, 
Mr.  ''Lulu"  Harcourt  and  a  lot  more.  Mr.  Blunt 
had  made  Oscar  Wilde  a  member  of  this  club,  and 
Wilde  attended  one  meeting.  It  was  the  custom 
that  any  new  member  should  be  proposed  in  a 
speech  at  dinner  on  the  first  night  of  the  meeting 


Our  Mutual  Friends  65 

and  opposed  by  some  one  else.  Wilde  was  opposed 
by  George  Curzon,  who  attacked  him  in  a  brilliant, 
humorous,  witty  but  deadly  speech  in  such  a  very 
scathing  way  that  he  never  could  be  induced  to  go  to 
another  meeting  of  the  Club.  As  an  undoubted  mem- 
ber of  this  club  he  certainly  could  claim  to  know  the 
other  members,  and  he  actually  passed  one  Satur- 
day to  Monday  at  Crabbet  in  their  company.  He 
never  forgot  it,  and  never  forgot  to  refer  to  them 
by  their  Christian  names  ever  afterwards ;  but  none 
of  them  ever  came  to  Wilde's  house  or  asked  him 
to  his,  with  the  solitary  exception  of  George  Wynd- 
ham,  under  circumstances  which  I  have  already  de- 
tailed. On  the  only  occasion  on  which  I  attended 
a  meeting  of  the  Crabbet  Club  I  was  proposed  by 
George  Wyndham  and  opposed  in  a  friendly  way 
by  Hubert  Howard,  who  was  afterwards  killed  at 
the  battle  of  Omdurman.  The  Crabbet  Club  was 
only  a  club  in  name.  There  was  no  subscription  and 
no  entrance  fee,  and  admittance  to  it  was  simply  by 
invitation  of  Mr.  Blunt,  who  used  the  annual  occa- 
sion of  the  meeting  of  the  club  as  a  pretext  for  a 
charming  and  most  lavish  hospitality.  I  was  ac- 
tually the  last  member  to  join  it,  and  the  year  I 
joined  was  the  last  year  of  its  existence.  One  of 
the  rules  of  the  club  was  that  Prime  Ministers, 
Bishops,  and  Viceroys  were  not  eligible  for  mem- 


66  Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

bership,  and  that  any  member  found  guilty  of 
attaining  such  positions  should  be  at  once  expelled. 
Nothing  was  said  about  convicts,  but  when  two 
of  the  members  (Lord  Curzon  and  Lord  Hough- 
ton) became  Viceroys,  and  one  (Oscar  Wilde)  was 
sent  to  prison,  Mr.  Blunt  came  to  the  conclusion 
that  the  Crabbet  Club  had  better  be  wound  up; 
and  it  lives  now  only  as  a  glorious  memory  and  by 
virtue  of  a  privately  printed  volume  of  prize  and 
other  poems,  mostly  of  a  satirical  nature,  which 
would  make  the  fortune  of  a  dealer  in  rare  books 
if  he  could  get  hold  of  a  copy.  I  may  be  excused 
for  mentioning  with  pride  that  I  won  the  lawn- 
tennis  tournament  of  my  year,  and  divided  the 
honours  of  the  Prize  Poem  with  the  late  Mr.  God- 
frey Webb,  known  as  "Webber''  to  his  numerous 
friends.  To  be  strictly  accurate,  Mr.  Godfrey 
Webb  was  declared  the  laureate  of  the  year,  and 
invested  with  the  laurel  wreath,  while  a  special 
prize  was  awarded  to  me  for  my  poem.  It  was  a 
beautifully  bound  edition  of  Surrey's  and  Wyatt's 
sonnets,  and  I  regret  to  say  that  I  left  it  behind  me 
at  Naples,  along  with  a  great  many  other  valuable 
and  interesting  books,  in  the  charge  of  Oscar  Wilde 
when  I  handed  over  my  villa  to  him.  All  these 
books  Wilde  sold  or  lost  soon  after  I  left  Naples. 


Our  Mutual  Friends  67 

The  prize  for  the  Lawn  Tennis  Tournament  I  still 
have  in  my  possession.  It  is  a  handsome  silver  cup 
of  the  Georgian  period,  and  is  inscribed  as  follows : 

'Tn  Youth  and  Crabbed  Age." 

Crabbet  Club, 

1894. 


CHAPTER  VI 

LORD  QUEENSBERRY  INTERVENES 

IN  1895  my  friendship  with  Oscar  Wilde  had 
ripened  into  an  intimacy  which  was  an 
affair  for  the  gossips.  We  were  inseparable : 
wherever  Wilde  went  I  went,  and  wherever  I  went 
Wilde  went.  I  was  living  at  my  mother's  house 
in  Cadogan  Place,  and  Wilde  at  his  house  in  Tite 
Street.  We  lunched  and  dined  usually  at  the  Cafe 
Royal  or  at  the  Savoy ;  we  visited  the  theatres  and 
music-halls  of  an  evening,  and  we  often  wound 
up  the  day  with  supper  at  Willis's  rooms.  I  had 
left  Oxford  and  my  time  was  my  own.  Money  did 
not  trouble  me  much  in  those  days.  My  father 
allowed  me  three  hundred  and  fifty  pounds  a  year 
for  pocket  money;  the  necessaries  and  luxuries  of 
life  were  always  at  my  disposal  at  home  and  in 
the  houses  of  my  numerous  friends  and  relatives; 
and  whenever  I  wanted  money  I  had  merely  to 
ask  my  mother  or  my  indulgent  Grandfather  Mont- 
gomery for  it.  One  way  or  another,  I  dare  say  I 
was  living  at  the  rate  of  at  least  fifteen  hundred  a 

68 


OSCAR    WILDE'S    HOUSE,     16    TITE    STREET,    CHELSEA 


Lord  Queensberry  Intervenes        69 

year.  Wilde  was  an  expensive  sort  of  friend,  par- 
ticularly after  he  began  to  consider  himself  a 
gourmet  and  a  man  of  the  great  world.  He  gave 
fairly  expensive  entertainments,  and  although  a 
chop  and  a  pint  of  bitter  beer  at  some  respectable 
inn  would  always  have  done  for  me,  I  never  pro- 
fessed to  be  insensible  to  the  charms  of  good  cook- 
ing, and  when  it  came  to  ordering  and  paying  for 
a  dinner  for  my  friends  I  was  certainly  not  to  be 
outdone  by  Wilde.  At  the  Ransome  trial,  among 
the  charges  brought  against  me  on  the  strength 
of  the  precious  document  which  Mr.  Ross  has 
handed  to  the  British  Museum,  was  that  of  extrava- 
gance, in  respect  of  which  I  had  to  meet  Wilde's 
stories  of  the  long-departed  menus  of  some  of  our 
Lucullian  feasts.  It  was  suggested  that  we  lived 
on  nothing  but  "delicious  ortolans" — by  the  way, 
are  there  any  ortolans  that  are  not  delicious  ? — and 
foie  gras  from  Strasbourg,  which  we  made  a  point 
of  washing  down  with  Perrier  Jouet  and  topped 
off  with  fifty-year-old  brandy.  Of  course,  I  do  not 
profess  to  remember  what  I  had  for  dinner  twenty 
years  ago ;  but  any  man  about  town  knows  that  one 
can  dine  very  comfortably  for  a  sovereign,  and  I 
happen  to  remember  that  Wilde  always  considered 
a  sovereign  quite  a  good  deal  of  money.  It  was 
further  suggested  that  between  the  autumn  of  1892 


70  Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

and  the  date  of  his  imprisonment — that  is  to  say,  in 
less  than  three  years — Wilde  spent  with  me  and  on 
me  more  than  five  thousand  pounds  in  actual  money, 
irrespective  of  the  bills  he  incurred.  But  in  plain 
terms  this  means  that  he  spent  at  least  forty  pounds 
a  week  in  entertaining  me.  So  that  for  three  years 
I  must  have  been  eating  three  meals  a  day  and 
twenty-one  meals  a  week,  at  a  cost  and  charge  of 
two  pounds  a  meal,  with  Oscar  Wilde.  I  cannot 
have  disbursed  a  penny  on  myself  or  on  him  and,  at 
the  end  of  the  three  years,  I  ought  to  have  had  a 
thousand  or  two  in  the  bank  and  a  stone  or  two  of 
flesh  to  spare.  In  point  of  fact,  even  in  those  early 
days  I  spent  a  great  deal  more  money  on  Wilde  than 
he  spent  on  me,  and  my  weight  has  stood  at  less 
than  ten  stone  five  ever  since  I  can  remember,  which, 
for  a  man  of  my  height,  does  not  point  to  much 
gourmandising.  It  is  a  pretty  thing  that  any 
gentleman  should  be  compelled  to  go  into  such  mat- 
ters, but  as  the  world  has  already  been  told  and 
is  to  be  told  again  in  1960  that  I  got  through  five 
thousand  pounds'  worth  of  Wilde's  ortolans  and 
Perrier  Jouet  in  three  years,  I  here  and  now  venture 
to  tell  the  world  that  I  did  nothing  of  the  kind.  In 
the  three  years  in  question,  it  is  exceedingly  doubt- 
ful whether  Wilde  ever  had  five  thousand  pounds 
at  his  disposal.    He  had  developed  expensive  tastes 


Lord  Queensberry  Intervenes        71 

in  many  other  directions  besides  food  and  drink: 
he  dressed  expensively,  he  wore  expensive  jewel- 
lery, he  made  presents  of  jewellery  and  money  to 
all  sorts  of  ridiculous  people;  the  upkeep  of  his 
house  in  Tite  Street  must  have  run  him  into  at 
least  a  thousand  a  year;  he  travelled  a  good  deal 
and  made  expensive  stays  in  Paris,  at  Homburg 
and  in  Italy;  and,  not  to  put  too  fine  a  point  on  it, 
he  was  continually  short  of  money.  On  several 
occasions  I  borrowed  money  from  moneylenders 
at  his  suggestion  and  instigation,  and  he  invariably 
helped  himself  liberally,  not  only  to  these  sums  but 
to  sums  of  money  which  I  obtained  from  my  mother 
and  from  my  other  relatives.  Indeed,  so  far  as  my 
money  was  concerned,  we  had  a  common  purse.  It 
never  occurred  to  me  to  refuse  him  anything. 
Nothing  was  too  good  for  him,  and  I  always  re- 
garded him  as  a  man  who,  although  he  might  have 
spurts  of  money,  was  without  proper  income  and 
resources,  and  was  consequently  to  be  helped  out 
whenever  occasion  demanded.  To  take  an  instance 
in  point:  just  before  "The  Woman  of  no  Impor- 
tance" was  put  on  at  the  Haymarket  I  went  to  a 
moneylender  and  borrowed  two  hundred  and  fifty 
pounds.  At  lunch  I  showed  Wilde  the  money  in  ten- 
pound  notes,  and  he  took  them  into  his  hand  and  said : 
*'How  beautiful  they  are  and  how  wonderful  it  is  of 


72  Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

you  to  be  able  to  get  them."  Then,  with  a  laugh,  he 
put  five  or  six  of  them  into  his  own  pocket  and 
handed  me  the  balance.  I  thought  no  more  about 
it  at  the  moment  than  I  should  have  thought  of 
sharing  a  bottle  of  wine  with  him.  Indeed,  I  got 
the  money  with  the  intention  of  giving  him  some 
of  it  because  he  had  been  groaning  for  over  a  week 
about  his  hard-upness.  This  is  only  one  instance  of 
many.  All  my  life  I  have  been  free-handed  and 
careless  about  money.  I  was  well  over  thirty  years 
of  age  before  it  dawned  upon  me  that  money  did 
not  grow  on  the  trees  on  the  family  estate.  There 
are  plenty  of  people  who  are  now  living  who  know 
me  well,  and  I  should  like  to  hear  one  of  them  who 
would  tell  me  that  I  am  ''thrifty"  or  that  I  permit 
my  friends  to  pay  out  of  their  turn.  It  is  true  that 
Wilde  and  I  were  for  a  long  period  on  terms  of 
friendship  which  were  quite  outside  and  beyond  the 
"you-ask-me-to-dinner-and  - 1  -  ask-you-back-  again" 
principle;  but  it  is  grotesquely  untrue  to  suggest 
that  he  wasted  any  appreciable  part  of  his  sub- 
stance upon  me.  Wilde  had  a  great  way  of  making 
everything  appear  important.  He  was  very  fond 
of  sending  for  the  managers  of  restaurants  to 
consult  them  over  the  merits  of  wine  or  to  bid 
them  summon  the  chef  to  receive  instruction  or 
compliment,  as  the  case  might  be.    These  were  not 


Lord  Queensberry  Intervenes        73 

practices  of  mine,  and  never  have  been.  Up  to  the 
time  of  my  meeting  Oscar  Wilde,  I  had  been  accus- 
tomed to  live  at  great  houses,  and  the  best  food  and 
the  best  drink  were  the  only  sort  I  knew  about.  It 
never  occurred  to  me  that  Wilde's  "exquisite'' 
spreads  were  anything  out  of  the  ordinary.  I  sup- 
pose the  cooking  at  the  Cafe  Royal  or  at  the  Savoy 
Hotel  is  good,  but  it  is  certainly,  to  say  the  least, 
no  better  than  what  one  gets  in  a  good  house  or  at 
a  good  club.  Wilde  made  fusses  and  went  through 
elaborate  rituals  over  the  ordering  of  his  meals. 
I,  for  my  part,  ordered,  ate  and  paid  for  them,  and 
thought  nothing  further  about  it. 

As  I  have  said,  our  constant  appearances  to- 
gether at  cafes,  restaurants,  theatres  and  public 
places  set  the  gossips  wagging  their  tongues.  I 
heard  all  sorts  of  rumours  which  were  silly  on  the 
face  of  them  and  which  were  a  good  deal  sillier 
when  one  thought  about  them.  Naturally,  I 
ignored  them  utterly.  I  am  convinced  that  some 
of  the  whispers  and  hints  that  went  around  were 
set  going  by  persons  who  deemed  that  I  had  sup- 
planted them  in  Wilde's  good  graces  and  who  were 
annoyed  because,  while  he  still  continued  to  know 
them,  he  ceased,  in  a  great  measure,  to  frequent 
their  company.  In  any  case,  I  was  made  to  feel 
that    certain   people    were    very    sore    about    my 


74  Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

''monopolising  Wilde/'  Egged  on  doubtless  by 
what  she  heard,  even  Mrs.  Wilde — with  whom  I 
always  had  been  on  the  most  friendly  terms — 
began  to  say  that  I  took  up  a  great  deal  too  much 
of  Oscar's  time,  and  Wilde  once  told  me  that  she 
had  made  difficulties  about  our  being  so  much  to- 
gether. I  told  him  that  we  certainly  did  seem  to 
be  always  together,  and  I  offered  to  go  away  and 
leave  him  to  his  own  devices;  but  he  said  that 
this  would  be  unbearable  to  him  and  that  he  had 
made  Mrs.  Wilde  understand  and  that  he  had  men- 
tioned the  matter  to  me  in  the  idlest  way  and  with- 
out any  notion  that  I  should  be  so  foolish  as  to  take 
him  seriously.  So  our  lives  drifted  along  as  usual. 
I  may  here  mention  that  for  the  first  three  years 
of  my  close  intimacy  with  Oscar  Wilde  I  never 
heard  a  coarse  or  indelicate  allusion  come  out  of 
his  mouth.  I  knew  him  for  a  somewhat  cynical  and 
insincere  kind  of  humourist;  I  was  not  blind  to  his 
faults  of  vanity  and  his  occasional  lapses  into  vul- 
gar manners ;  I  knew  he  was  no  saint,  even  as  men 
of  the  world  go;  but  I  considered  that  he  was  a 
man  of  decent  life,  and  I  never  heard  from  him  a 
word  or  a  sign  which  made  me  think  otherwise. 
He  treated  me  always  with  the  greatest  and,  I  may 
even  say,  the  most  elaborate  courtesy,  and  I  noticed 
particularly  that  when  we  were  in  the  society  of 


Lord  Queensberry  Intervenes        75 

men  who  were  apt  to  kick  somewhat  over  the  traces 
and  indulge  in  Rabelaisian  conversation  Wilde  was 
eagerly  careful  to  turn  or  suppress  the  talk.  He 
therefore  seemed  to  be  all  that  a  man  should  be; 
and  when  I  heard  on  one  or  two  occasions  certain 
other  hints  of  tendencies  of  his,  I  repudiated  them 
with  indignation,  believing  that,  as  I  was  his  close 
friend,  I  knew  him  through  and  through,  and  feel- 
ing that  there  could  not  possibly  be  any  truth  in 
what  was  suggested. 

Some  years  before  I  met  Wilde  my  mother  had 
found  it  desirable  to  divorce  my  father,  and  at  the 
time  to  which  I  am  now  referring  the  family  rela- 
tionships were  not  exactly  running  smooth.  To 
be  quite  frank,  I  had  conceived  feelings  of  resent- 
ment against  my  father  on  account  of  his  treatment 
of  my  mother  which  I  am  afraid  were  far  from 
filial.  You  may  judge,  then,  of  my  anger  when 
Wilde  one  day  told  me  that  Lord  Queensberry  had 
sent  him  a  letter  in  which  he  requested  Wilde  to 
terminate  his  friendship  with  me  at  once,  inasmuch 
as  he  did  not  think  it  would  be  beneficial  to  me. 
Wilde  asked  me  what  he  should  do,  and  I  told  him 
to  take  no  notice  of  the  letter.  Later,  my  father 
sent  me  a  letter  in  which  he  told  me  what  he  had 
said  to  Wilde,  and  threatened  to  cut  ofif  my  allow- 
ance if  I  did  not  at  once  terminate  the  acquaintance. 


76  Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

I  was  not  aware  of  any  grounds  upon  which  Lord 
Queensberry  could  make  such  a  request,  and  con- 
cluded that  he  had  written  to  me  for  the  mere  pur- 
pose of  annoyance  and  because  he  knew  that  I  had 
taken  sides  with  my  mother  since  the  divorce  pro- 
ceedings. Consequently,  I  sent  him  a  fairly  sting- 
ing reply,  and  a  heated  correspondence  followed. 
Portions  of  that  correspondence  have  been  pre- 
served in  glass  cases  by  careful  lawyers,  and  these 
relics  of  an  unpleasant  feud  have  been  brought  up 
against  me  in  various  cross-examinations  with  a 
view  to  proving  that  I  was  an  unfilial  brute  and  that 
I  treated  my  own  father  very  badly. 

In  the  light  of  what  has  happened  since,  I  know 
that  I  was  hasty  and  mistaken,  but  one  cannot  be 
the  son  of  the  eighth  Marquis  of  Queensberry  nor 
a  member  of  the  family  of  Douglas  without  having 
the  defects  of  one's  qualities.  I  did  not  sit  down 
to  the  abuse  of  my  father  in  the  manner  of  a  person 
without  spirit  for  the  very  simple  reason  that  I  am 
not  devoid  of  spirit  and  never  shall  be.  However, 
before  he  died  my  father  sent  for  me  and  there  was 
a  complete  reconciliation  between  us,  and  he  left 
me  every  shilling  that  could  possibly  be  arranged 
for  me  out  of  his  very  considerable  estate. 

Failing  to  make  disruption  between  myself  and 
Wilde,  Lord  Queensberry  adopted  a  different  line 


«-*-*' 

^ 

CLOUDS. 

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SALISBURY, 

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luJ^M^    ,uJ^^cJ<     ^i-^^cM     c^    yv^ 


Lord  Queensberry  Intervenes        81 

of  tactics;  and,  I  believe,  with  the  sincere  view  of 
saving  me  from  what  he  knew  was  an  undesirable 
entanglement,  he  went  ahead  to  disgrace  Wilde 
publicly.  At  a  theatre  where  one  of  Wilde's  plays 
was  running  he  caused  a  bouquet  of  carrots  to  be 
handed  up  to  Wilde  over  the  footlights,  and  he  left 
his  card  on  him  at  his  club  with  certain  odious 
remarks  written  on  the  back  of  it.  I  need  scarcely 
say  that  Wilde  was  very  much  distressed.  He  came 
to  me  in  a  great  state  about  it  and  said  that  it  was 
most  wicked  and  cruel  of  my  father  to  treat  him 
in  this  way  and  that,  unless  an  immediate  apology 
was  forthcoming,  he  would  have  no  alternative  but 
to  prosecute  Lord  Queensberry  for  criminal  libel. 
I  was  a  little  bit  nettled  at  the  tone  he  took,  as  he 
seemed  to  imply  by  his  air  that  I  was  in  some 
way  to  blame  for  what  had  happened;  and  I  said 
at  once:  ''You  are  not  in  the  least  likely  to  get 
apologies  from  my  father  and,  so  far  as  I  am  con- 
cerned, you  can  prosecute  and  be  blowed!" 

It  has  been  widely  asserted  that  I  went  out  of 
my  way  to  instigate  these  proceedings  against  my 
father.  It  is  quite  certain  that  I  did  not  go  on 
my  bended  knees  to  ask  Wilde  not  to  take  pro- 
ceedings. He  assured  me  that  the  suggestions  and 
accusation  against  him  were  quite  false  and  without 
foundation.    I  had  not  the  smallest  reason  to  sup- 


82  Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

pose  that  he  was  lying  to  me,  and  I  undoubtedly 
allowed  matters  to  take  their  course.  I  will  go 
further,  and  say  that  in  a  sense  I  was  not  sorry 
that  Lord  Queensberry  should  be  brought  to  book 
for  what  I  considered  to  be  his  very  bad  treatment 
of  both  myself  and  Wilde.  I  went  with  Wilde,  at 
his  request,  to  see  a  lawyer  on  the  subject.  This 
lawyer  had  been  recommended  to  him  by  Robert 
Ross,  who  also  accompanied  us  on  this  occasion. 
He  advised  proceedings,  and  we  went  to  Bow  Street 
and  procured  a  warrant  for  my  father's  arrest.  On 
the  morning  the  warrant  was  executed  Wilde  came 
to  me  in  a  condition  bordering  on  hysteria,  told 
me  that  he  had  no  money  and  that  at  least  three 
hundred  pounds  were  required  in  order  that  the 
case  might  go  on.  At  his  urgent  solicitation,  I 
gave  him  three  hundred  and  sixty  pounds  to  give 
to  his  solicitor.  (The  figures  appear  in  my  bank- 
book and  were  proved  at  the  Ransome  trial. )  This, 
I  am  told,  was  most  unnatural  conduct.  Wilde,  for 
his  part,  pointed  out  that  it  was  entirely  through  his 
friendship  for  me  that  he  had  to  sufifer  Lord 
Queensberry's  insults,  and  that  unless  he  went  on 
with  the  prosecution  he  would  be  branded  through- 
out Europe  for  a  person  of  vicious  and  abominable 
life;  and  that,  as  I  had  been  the  means  of  getting 
him  into  the  trouble,  it  would  be  a  poor  thing  if 


Lord  Queensberry  Intervenes        83 

I  would  not  find  a  few  hundreds  to  get  him  out 
again.  What  was  I  to  do — and  what  would  any 
man  so  placed  have  done?  I  should  have  liked 
to  have  quoted  verbatim  Wilde's  version  of  this 
episode  as  it  was  put  to  me  at  the  Ransome  trial; 
but  since  the  manuscript  of  this  book  was  completed 
Mr.  Robert  Ross  has  obtained  an  injunction  against 
me,  by  which  I  am  precluded  from  quoting  any  part 
of  the  unpublished  ''De  Profundis''  manuscript. 
This  unpublished  part  has  been  used  against  me  in 
the  most  frightful  manner.  Venomous  passages 
have  been  read  in  open  court  and  reproduced  in 
hundreds  of  newspapers,  and  yet  I  understand  I 
am  debarred  from  quoting  from  it  for  the  purpose 
of  replying  to  it  and  pointing  out  its  obvious  falsity. 
It  is  unnecessary  for  me  to  enlarge  on  the  absolute 
negation  of  every  principle  of  justice  and  common 
sense  which  is  involved  in  such  a  decision :  it  is  too 
obvious  for  that.  I  do  not  say  that  such  decision 
may  not  be  a  correct  interpretation  of  the  law  as  it 
exists,  though  it  is  hard  to  believe  it.  What  I  do 
say  is  that  the  existence  of  such  a  law  is  a  disgrace 
and  a  danger  to  the  community,  for  it  is  obvious 
that  under  its  provisions  any  man  can  foully  slander 
another  and  so  arrange  his  slander  that  reply  to  it 
becomes  impossible  during  the  lifetime  of  the  slan- 
dered.    For  example,  there  is  nothing  to  prevent 


84  Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

me  from  writing  a  long  letter,  say,  to  Mr.  Justice 
Astbury — the  judge  who  granted  Mr.  Ross  the 
interim  injunction  restraining  me  from  quoting 
passages  from  the  unpublished  "De  Profundis."  I 
can,  if  I  please,  accuse  him  in  this  letter  of  every 
sort  of  crime  and  impute  to  him  every  kind  of  base- 
ness ;  I  can  attack  his  parents  and  his  relations  and 
I  can  ascribe  to  him  imaginary  words  alleged  to 
have  been  spoken  by  him,  and  I  can  invent  imag- 
inary scenes  in  which  I  allege  that  he  has  taken 
part.  All  I  have  to  do  is  to  hand  this  letter  to  a 
friend  and  give  him  instructions  that  after  my 
death  it  is  to  be  placed  in  the  British  Museum  and 
kept  there  till  such  time  as  the  friend  may  think 
fitting  to  bring  it  out  and  publish  it.  If  Mr.  Justice 
Astbury  should  happen  to  outlive  me,  and  if  he 
should  thereupon  by  some  chance  get  knowledge  of 
the  fact  that  a  long  epistle  addressed  to  him  and 
containing  a  violent  attack  on  his  character  is  lying 
in  the  British  Museum  and  is  to  be  published  in  fifty 
years'  time,  he  will  be  powerless  to  take  the  smallest 
step  to  prevent  the  publication  of  this  posthumous 
libel,  and  he  will  not  even  be  able  to  defend  himself 
against  the  accusations  it  contains.  The  copyright 
in  the  manuscript  will  be  the  property  of  my  heirs 
and  executors,  and  should  Mr.  Justice  Astbury 
propose  to  quote  any  part  of  it  with  a  view  to  show- 


Lord  Queensberry  Intervenes        85 

ing  its  scandalous  and  ridiculous  falsity  he  will  im- 
mediately be  pulled  up  by  the  law  of  copyright.  My 
slanderous  and  shameful  letter  will  be  a  valuable 
literary  property;  for  Mr.  Justice  Astbury  to  quote 
passages  from  it  would  be  injurious  to  its  market 
value.  In  vain  he  would  protest  that  he  was  surely 
entitled  to  defend  himself  against  an  attack  made 
on  him  by  a  dead  man  and  designed  to  be  made 
public  to  the  world  after  his  own  death.  He  would 
simply  be  told  that  ''the  law  is  quite  clear/'  and 
he  would  have  to  grin  and  bear  it  as  well  as  he 
could,  just  as  I  have  to  do  under  precisely  similar 
circumstances.  What  I  can,  at  any  rate,  legiti- 
mately do — even  within  the  narrow  compass  which 
Mr.  Justice  Astbury's  interpretation  of  the  law 
allows  me — is  to  set  out  the  true  facts  connected 
with  this  period  of  Wilde's  career  and  my  own  con- 
nection with  it. 

I  desire  firstly  to  state  emphatically  that  I  did 
not  force  Wilde  into  taking  proceedings  against 
my  father.  The  matter  can  be  summed  up  in  a 
few  sentences.  My  father  had  accused  Wilde  of 
certain  abominations.  These  accusations  it  seems 
were  true.  Wilde  denied  the  truth  of  them  to  me 
and  proceeded  to  take  up  what,  in  view  of  the  facts 
known  to  himself  and  not  to  me,  was  a  ridiculous 
prosecution  against  my  father.    He  was,  of  course, 


86  Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

beaten,  and  the  authorities  turned  upon  him  and 
convicted  him  of  crimes  which  he  had  denied.  Then 
I  became  a  convenient  scapegoat. 

I  did  not  drag  Wilde  down  to  Bow  Street  to 
procure  a  warrant.  I  went  with  him,  but  at  his 
own  request.  The  suggestion  of  coercion — either 
moral  or  physical — is  ridiculous.  Here  was  the 
''King  of  Life" — a  great  big,  fat,  strong  fellow, 
full  of  brains  and  forty-one  years  of  age — "in  the 
prime  of  his  splendid  manhood,"  as  one  of  his 
admirers  puts  it;  and  I  was  sixteen  years  his  junior 
— that  is  to  say,  twenty-four  years  of  age.  The 
real  fact  is  that  he  had  something  inside  him  that 
I  knew  nothing  about — namely  and  to  wit,  a  guilty 
conscience.  He  was  too  much  of  a  coward  to  tell 
me  that  he  was  guilty  of  the  charges  the  Marquis 
of  Queensberry  had  levelled  at  him,  and  he  was 
too  much  of  a  coward,  even,  to  go  to  Bow  Street 
for  a  warrant  alone :  so  he  came  whimpering  to  me 
to  go  with  him. 

I  did  not  coerce  or  cajole  Wilde  into  going  to 
Monte  Carlo  at  this  time,  nor  did  Wilde  pay  my 
expenses  or  my  gambling  losses.  Wilde  said  his 
nerves  were  all  broken  up.  He  had  never  been 
to  Monte  Carlo,  and  we  went  there  in  order  that 
he  might  be  distracted  from  the  question  of  the 
trial,  upon  which  he  seemed  to  brood  a  great  deal. 


THE    LATE    MARQUIS    OF    QUEENSBERRY 


Lord  Queensberry  Intervenes        87 

Believing  him  to  be  an  innocent  man,  I  told  him 
that  he  was  a  fool  to  worry  and  that  it  was  the  other 
side  who  ought  to  do  the  worrying,  and  we  went  to 
]\Ionte  Carlo.  I  have  frequently  been  to  Monte 
Carlo,  and  I  have  never  in  my  life  spent  more  than 
two  hours  at  a  stretch  in  the  rooms.  On  this  par- 
ticular occasion  I  was  less  frequently  in  the  rooms 
and  for  less  periods  of  time  than  I  have  ever  been 
before  or  since,  largely  because  Wilde  was  with  me. 
More  often  than  not  he  was  with  me  in  the  rooms, 
and  I  gave  him  more  than  one  handful  of  louis  out 
of  my  winnings.  He  never  had  the  pluck  to  put  a 
louis  on  the  table  because,  as  I  have  said,  he  always 
felt  that  a  gold  piece  was  a  good  deal  of  money.  In 
any  case,  does  it  stand  to  reason  that  a  man  who 
had  no  money  wherewith  to  pay  his  solicitor's  fees 
was  the  kind  of  man  one  would  take  to  Monte  Carlo 
to  pay  one's  hotel  expenses  and  Casino  losses  ?  No 
one  but  a  fool  would  pretend  to  believe  such  a 
farrago  of  rubbish. 

Wilde's  friends,  including  the  never-to-be-for- 
gotten Robert  Sherard,  with  the  "face  like  a  Roman 
Emperor,"  whom  Wilde  thought  "perfectly  wonder- 
ful," have  echoed  the  cry  that  I  was  the  author  of 
his  disaster  and  downfall.  Even  Mrs.  Wilde  writes 
to  tell  Sherard  that  I  had  "marred  a  fine  life."  Mr. 
Ransome,  who  tells  his  readers  that  he  derives  his 


88  Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

biographical  facts  from  Ross,  says  it  in  print.  All 
these  people  should  surely  have  been  aware  that  the 
person  who  ruined  Oscar  Wilde  and  brought  about 
his  disaster  and  marred  his  life  was  Oscar  Wilde 
himself.  He  was  not  charged  at  the  Old  Bailey 
for  having  taken  proceedings  against  the  Marquis 
of  Queensberry,  but  for  having  made  a  low,  squalid 
and  abominable  brute  of  himself.  They  prefer  to 
assume  that  he  was  convicted  on  false  evidence 
and  to  speak  always  of  me  as  the  author  of  his 
debacle.  Their  great  point  seems  to  be  that  if  he 
had  not  known  me  he  would  probably  never  have 
been  found  out  and  might  have  passed  down  to 
posterity  for  one  of  those  highly  respectable  per- 
sons of  whom  he  professes  to  be  so  contemptuous; 
and  if  this  be  their  point,  I  will  cheerfully  concede 
it  to  them. 

It  was  also  a  charge  against  me — again  on 
Wilde's  word  only — that  I  was,  at  the  time  of  his 
trouble,  attacking  him  with  loathsome  letters.  Now, 
what  does  this  mean,  and  what  is  the  suggestion? 
Where  are  those  letters,  and  how  could  I  be  ac- 
cusing him  in  letters  on  the  one  hand,  and  putting 
up  money  to  defend  him  from  these  very  accusa- 
tions on  the  other  ?  I  had  written  him  no  loathsome 
letters :  all  I  had  written  after  our  conversation  on 
the  subject  was  a  letter  in  which  I  confirmed  my 


Lord  Queensberry  Intervenes        89 

opinion  that,  as  he  was  innocent  of  these  charges, 
he  had  no  alternative  but  to  proceed  against  my 
father.  Yet  this  was  brought  against  me  as  being 
as  'loathsome''  as  the  cards  on  which  my  father 
had  been  charging  him  with  a  terrible  offence.  The 
truth  was  that  Wilde,  having  once  decided  to  take 
proceedings  against  my  father,  made  up  his  mind 
that,  if  they  failed,  I  was  to  be  responsible  for 
everything. 


CHAPTER  VII 

THE  WILDE  TRIALS 

A  LL  the  world  knows  that  the  proceedings 
/\  against  my  father  broke  down,  as  it  was 
jL,  JL,  only  natural  that  they  should.  Wilde  had 
a  guilty  mind,  which  he  was  careful  to  hide  from 
me,  and  he  attributed  his  defeat  to  "a  foul  and  hide- 
ous conspiracy''  and  not  to  the  fact  that  my  father 
had  merely  spoken  the  truth.  One  of  his  biog- 
raphers has  given  a  highly  melodramatic  account  of 
what  happened  after  the  collapse  of  the  prosecution. 
Says  the  writer  in  question:  "At  that  moment,  my 
friend,  with  some  companions,  was  sitting  in  a 
private  room  in  the  Cadogan  Arms  (sic),  smoking 
cigarettes,  drinking  whisky-and-soda,  and  waiting. 
What  for  waiting  (sic),  not  one  of  them  could  have 
said.  They  had  set  fire  to  a  mine  and  were  trying  to 
stupefy  themselves  into  the  belief  and  hope  that  it 
would  not  explode  beneath  them.  It  was  reported  to 
me  that  when,  after  an  intentional  delay  of  many 
hours,  unable  to  wait  any  longer,  the  police  at  last 
moved  and  a  knock  came  at  the  door  of  that  sitting- 

90 


The  Wilde  Trials  91 

room  in  the  Cadogan  Arms,  they  all  blanched  as  if 
under  the  shock  of  a  sudden  surprise.  Not  one  of  his 
friends  had  the  sense  to  explain  to  Wilde  what  was 
the  true  meaning  of  the  warning  his  counsel  had 
given  at  the  close  of  his  cross-examination,  or  to 
force  him  to  realise  that,  if  only  as  a  matter  of 
public  policy,  he  should  leave  the  country  at  once. 
As  a  matter  of  fact,  the  warrant  for  his  arrest  was 
not  signed  until  after  the  last  day  train  for  Dover, 
carefully  watched,  had  been  seen  to  leave  without 
him,  and  it  was  impossible  to  delay  action  any 
longer." 

The  inexactitudes  herein  set  forward  are  as 
beautiful  as  they  are  numerous.  In  the  first  place, 
this  wonderful  biographer's  friend  never  sat  with 
some  companions  in  a  private  room  in  the  Cadogan 
Arms  smoking  cigarettes  and  drinking  whiskies  and 
soda.  Wilde's  companions,  for  reasons  best  known 
to  themselves,  disappeared  like  snowflakes  on  a 
river  the  moment  it  was  known  that  Sir  Edward 
Clarke  had  withdrawn  from  the  proceedings  against 
my  father.  The  only  person  left  with  him  at  this 
precise  juncture  happens  to  have  been  myself.  We 
were  both  well  aware  that  Wilde's  arrest  might  fol- 
low on  what  had  happened ;  and  Wilde  was  not  only 
sure  that  he  was  about  to  be  arrested,  but  he  told 
me  that  in  all  likelihood  they  would  arrest  me  also. 


92  Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

I  did  my  best  to  cheer  him  up,  and  I  pointed  out  to 
him  that  they  were  welcome  to  indulge  in  any 
amount  of  arresting,  since  he  said  himself  that  he 
had  done  nothing  and  I  knew  that  I  had  done  noth- 
ing. I  had  a  suite  of  rooms  at  the  Cadogan  Hotel — 
not  ''Arms,"  Mr.  Sherard,  if  you  please ! — in  Sloane 
Street,  and  I  drove  Wilde  there  from  the  Old  Bailey 
after  we  had  lunched  at  the  Holborn  Hotel.  I 
never  saw  a  man  more  broken  up  or  more  nervously 
anxious  about  himself.  He  kept  on  tearfully  pro- 
testing that  it  was  a  vile  and  hideous  conspiracy 
against  him,  and  that  the  suspense  would  kill  him. 
I  managed  to  bring  him  to  reason,  somewhat,  by 
talking  to  him  pretty  plainly;  and,  in  order  to  help 
him  with  the  suspense  difficulty,  I  went  down  to  the 
House  of  Commons  to  see  my  cousin,  George 
Wyndham,  and  asked  him  if  he  could  find  out  what 
the  authorities  intended  to  do.  Wyndham  saw  me 
in  the  lobby  and,  after  making  enquiries  in  the 
House,  came  out  and  told  me  that  Sir  Robert  Reid 
had  told  him  that  there  was  to  be  a  prosecution.  I 
went  back  to  the  Cadogan  Hotel  and  found  there, 
not  Oscar  Wilde,  but  a  letter  in  which  he  told  me 
he  had  been  arrested  and  would  have  to  pass 
the  night  at  Bow  Street,  and  asking  me  to  see  vari- 
ous people  on  the  question  of  bail,  and  also  to  come 
to  Bow  Street  and  try  to  see  him.    This  letter  I 


The  Wilde  Trials  93 

had  intended  to  produce  in  facsimile,  but  the  amiable 
Mr.  Ross  has  obtained  an  injunction  which  prevents 
me  from  doing  so.  There  was  never  any  question 
of  his  leaving  the  country  until  the  time  when  he 
was  out  on  bail.  According  to  his  own  showing,  he 
had  no  reason  for  leaving  the  country  other  than 
to  avoid  the  inconvenience  of  a  criminal  trial.  In 
any  case,  he  could  not  have  left,  because  he  was 
shadowed  by  detectives  from  the  moment  he  had  left 
the  Old  Bailey  that  morning.  So  far  from  sitting 
in  private  rooms  and  endeavouring  to  stupefy  our- 
selves with  cigarettes  and  whisky,  we  had  spent  the 
hour  after  lunch  in  going  round  to  George  Lewis, 
the  solicitor,  to  see  if  he  could  do  anything.  He 
said  it  was  too  late  for  anything  to  be  done,  and 
that  if  the  matter  had  been  taken  to  him  in  the  first 
instance,  he  would  simply  have  destroyed  my 
father's  card  and  told  Wilde  not  to  be  a  fool.  In 
view  of  Mr.  Ross's  attempt  to  attribute  Wilde's 
downfall  to  my  bad  advice,  it  is  singular  that  I  had 
recommended  him  to  go  to  Mr.  Lewis.  If  he  had 
done  so,  there  would  have  been  no  prosecution.  As 
it  was,  he  went  to  Mr.  Ross's  own  solicitor,  Mr. 
Humphreys,  who  advised  the  prosecution  which 
proved  so  disastrous. 

I  do  not  think  that  the  grounds  upon  which  Sir 
Edward   Clarke  withdrew   from   the   proceedings 


94  Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

against  my  father  have  ever  been  stated,  and  con- 
sequently I  set  them  out  herewith.  Sir  Edward 
Clarke,  like  myself,  believed  in  Wilde's  innocence. 
He  looked  upon  him  as  more  or  less  of  a  madman, 
who  did  everything  that  was  foolish  and  unwise 
for  the  mere  sake  of  appearing  eccentric  or 
superior;  but  he  nevertheless  believed  that  he  was 
innocent  of  any  actual  viciousness.  After  Sir  Ed- 
ward Carson's  cross-examination  of  Wilde,  there 
was  a  conference,  and  Sir  Edward  Clarke  pointed 
out  that  it  would  be  impossible  to  get  over  the  preju- 
dice created  in  the  minds  of  the  jury  by  Wilde's 
admissions  in  the  witness-box.  Sir  Edward  Carson 
had  made  great  use  of  'The  Picture  of  Dorian 
Gray"  in  the  course  of  the  cross-examination,  and 
passages  had  been  read  which  obviously  pointed  to 
a  most  objectionable  attitude  of  mind  on  the  part 
of  the  author  towards  certain  vices.  Sir  Edward 
Clarke  advised  that  when  the  proceedings  opened 
next  day,  no  further  evidence  should  be  offered 
against  the  Marquis  of  Queensberry,  and  that  the 
case  against  him  should  be  abandoned  on  the 
ground  that  what  Wilde  had  written  and  published 
in  ''Dorian  Gray"  would  be  sufficient  to  justify  a 
reasonable  person  in  supposing  that  Wilde  sympa- 
thised with  the  vices  in  question.  It  should  be 
pointed  out  that  my  father  had  not  accused  Wilde 


The  Wilde  Trials  95 

of  the  actual  practice  of  these  vices;  on  the  card 
which  he  left  at  Wilde's  club  he  had  written  an 
accusation  against  Wilde  as  "posing"  as  a  vicious 
person.  Sir  Edward  Clarke  was  of  opinion  that, 
if  the  course  indicated  were  taken,  the  defence 
would  be  more  or  less  appeased  and  that  Wilde 
would,  to  some  extent,  save  his  face  and  lessen  the 
risks  of  a  subsequent  prosecution.  "If  you  with- 
draw from  the  case  now,"  said  Sir  Edward,  "it  will 
be  a  nine  days'  talk,  but  you  will  probably  hear  no 
more  about  it  so  far  as  the  authorities  are  con- 
cerned. If  you  continue,  and  Lord  Queensberry  is 
found  'not  guilty,'  they  will,  in  all  probability,  arrest 
you  in  court."  Mr. — now  Sir  Charles — Matthews, 
who  was  also  counsel  for  Wilde,  agreed  with  Sir 
Edward,  and  it  was  decided  to  withdraw.  Every- 
body who  writes  about  this  part  of  the  proceedings 
contrives  to  suggest  that  Sir  Edward  Clarke  threw 
up  the  sponge  in  disgust  and  without  Wilde's  con- 
sent or  knowledge.  In  point  of  fact,  Wilde  con- 
sented to  the  withdrawal  and,  so  far  from  throwing 
him  over  as  a  client,  both  Sir  Edward  Clarke  and 
Sir  Charles  Matthews  defended  him  in  the  two  sub- 
sequent trials,  and,  what  is  more,  defended  him 
for  nothing. 

On  returning  to  the  Cadogan  Hotel  and  finding 
that  Wilde  had  been  arrested,  I  went  straight  to 


96  Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

Bow  Street  and  offered  bail  for  his  temporary 
release.  I  was  told  that  bail  could  not  be  accepted 
that  night  and  that,  if  bail  were  accepted  at  all, 
other  securities  besides  myself  would  be  required. 
I  went  off  at  once  to  see  Mr. — now  Sir  George — 
Alexander  and  Mr.  Lewis  Waller,  at  whose  theatres 
Wilde's  plays  were  running,  and  asked  them  to  offer 
bail.  In  the  letter  Wilde  left  for  me  at  the  Cadogan 
he  requested  me  to  see  these  gentlemen  for  that 
purpose.  They  both  refused.  Between  the  time 
of  his  arrest  and  of  his  trial  at  the  Old  Bailey,  Wilde 
was  kept  at  Holloway  Prison,  and  either  there  or  at 
Bow  Street  I  visited  him  daily  for  a  period  of  three 
or  four  weeks.  There  was  nobody  else  to  come 
near  him.  His  companions  had  left  the  country, 
his  wife  would  have  nothing  to  do  with  him,  and 
his  general  acquaintance  was  going  about  London 
protesting  that  it  had  never  known  him.  It  is  the 
fashion  to  say  that  I  deserted  him.  At  the  Ran- 
some  trial  Mr.  Campbell,  k.c,  had  the  face  to  put 
it  to  me  that  I  fled  the  country.  If  a  daily  pilgrim- 
age to  Holloway  and  daily  interviews  with  a  pris- 
oner are  desertion  and  fleeing  the  country,  then 
my  gentle  detractors  are  right.  Without  the  slight- 
est intention  of  benefit  to  me,  a  certain  person  has 
made  public  a  letter  which  states  that  my  daily  visits 
were  the  only  things  which  quickened  Wilde  into 


The  Wilde  Trials  97 

life.  And  here  is  a  portion  of  a  letter  which  I 
myself  had  occasion  to  write  to  this  same  person :  "I 
saw  Oscar  yesterday  in  a  private  room  at  the  police 
court,  and  he  gave  me  your  three  letters  and  asked 
me  to  write  and  tell  you  how  deeply  touched  he  was 
by  your  kindness  and  sympathy  and  loyalty  to  him 
in  his  terrible  and  undeserved  trouble.  He  himself 
is  so  ill  and  unhappy  that  he  has  not  sufficient 
strength  and  energy  to  write,  and  all  his  time  has 
to  be  devoted  to  preparing  his  defence  against  a 
diabolical  conspiracy,  which  seems  almost  unlimited 
in  its  size  and  strength.  I  will  not  add  to  your 
sorrow  by  telling  you  of  the  privations  and  suffer- 
ings he  has  to  endure.  I  have  seen  him  three  times 
since  his  arrest:  once  through  a  horrible  kind  of 
barred  cage,  separated  from  him  by  a  space  of  one 
yard  and  in  almost  complete  darkness,  with  twenty 
other  people  talking  at  the  same  time.  This  is  the 
ordinary  way,  and  one  visit  a  day  of  a  quarter  of 
an  hour  is  all  he  is  allowed.  After  that,  I  managed 
to  get  an  order  from  the  Home  Secretary  to  see  him 
in  a  private  room  for  three-quarters  of  an  hour.  And 
yesterday  I  contrived  to  have  a  fairly  long  interview 
with  him  at  the  police  court.  In  spite  of  all  the 
brutal  and  cowardly  clamour  of  our  disgusting 
newspapers,  I  think  the  sympathy  of  all  decent  men 
is  with  him,  and  that  he  will  ultimately  triumph ;  but 


98  Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

he  has  much  to  go  through  first.  I  have  determined 
to  remain  here  and  do  what  I  possibly  can,  though 
I  am  warned  on  all  hands  that  my  own  risk  is  not 
inconsiderable  and  my  family  implore  me  to  go 
away."  It  is  plain,  on  the  whole,  therefore,  that 
desertion  and  fleeing  the  country  are  rather  out  of 
the  picture. 

During  the  time  that  Wilde  lay  in  Holloway 
Prison  I  began  to  have  a  certain  amount  of  doubt 
as  to  his  innocence.  In  our  repeated  conversations 
he  clung  to  the  conspiracy  fiction  with  considerable 
persistence.  As  the  time  for  the  trial  drew  near, 
however,  he  began  to  weaken,  and  eventually  he 
admitted  that  there  were  "things  in  his  life  which 
could  be  made  to  look  pretty  awkward;''  but  this 
was  as  far  as  he  would  go.  His  one  anxiety  seemed 
to  be  that  I  should  not  give  him  up,  and  I  always 
told  him  that  I  never  would.  One  day  he  said  to 
me:  "Even  if  these  horrible  tales  were  true,  you 
would  stick  to  me,  wouldn't  you?"  And  I  said,  "Of 
course  I  would."  It  was  not  until  the  day  before 
the  trial  that  he  made  anything  like  a  proper  attempt 
to  unburden  himself.  It  had  been  arranged  that  I 
should  see  him  in  a  private  room  on  this  day  and 
that  we  should  have  a  longer  interview  than  was 
permitted  by  the  regulations.  We  talked  on  gen- 
eral matters  for  some  time,  but  ultimately  Wilde 


The  Wilde  Trials  99 

became  very  serious  and  said  that  he  did  not  see 
how  it  was  possible  for  him  to  hope  for  a  verdict 
of  ''not  guilty."  He  then  went  on  to  tell  me  that, 
''in  a  way,"  the  charges  set  forward  in  the  indict- 
ment were  true  and  that  he  must  have  been  mad 
to  live  as  he  had  been  living  and  that  his  only  hope 
was  that  the  skill  of  Clarke  and  Matthews  might 
save  him  from  the  severest  punishment.  He  re- 
minded me  of  my  promise  not  to  forsake  him  and, 
though  I  was  shocked  at  what  he  told  me,  I  am  free 
to  confess  that  it  never  entered  into  my  head  that 
it  was  my  duty  forthwith  to  give  up  his  acquaint- 
ance. I  told  him  that  what  he  had  said  should  not 
make  any  difference  and  that  I  would  stick  to  him 
through  thick  and  thin. 

In  the  meanwhile  great  pressure  was  being 
brought  to  bear  on  me  by  my  family  to  leave  the 
country.  My  father's  advisers  put  up  the  very 
worst  reason  they  could  have  chosen  to  get  me  to 
do  this.  They  pretended  that,  as  my  name  had  been 
so  continually  linked  with  Wilde's,  and  as  a  silly 
letter  he  had  addressed  to  me  had  been  read  in 
court,  I  was  under  some  danger  of  being  arrested 
and  charged  with  him.  Such  threats  did  not  move 
me  in  the  least — rather,  they  confirmed  me  in  my 
determination  to  stop  where  I  was.  During  those 
unpleasant  days  I  seemed  almost  to  live  at  Bow 


100         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

Street  or  Holloway,  so  that  if  the  police  had  wanted 
me  they  knew  where  to  find  me.  Then  Sir  Edward 
Clarke  took  a  hand,  quite  independently,  I  believe, 
of  any  suggestion  from  my  family.  He  pointed  out 
that  my  continued  association  with  Wilde  after  the 
collapse  of  the  case  against  my  father  was  creating 
all  sorts  of  comment  and  prejudice,  and  that  it 
would  be  much  better  for  Wilde  if  I  went  abroad. 
When  I  put  it  to  Wilde  he  said  that  he  quite  agreed 
with  Sir  Edward  Clarke  and  that  I  should  be  oblig- 
ing him  and  putting  him  in  a  better  position  in  the 
eyes  of  the  world  if  I  remained  away  during  the 
trial.  Even  with  this  assurance  I  was  not  satisfied, 
and  I  asked  Wilde  to  think  it  over  and  put  it  into 
writing,  which  he  did.  I  thereupon  left  England 
for  Paris.  The  result  of  the  trial  was  that  the 
jury  disagreed.  There  had  been  six  counts  in  the 
indictment,  and  the  prosecution  had  brought  up  all 
sorts  of  extraordinary  evidence,  but  the  jury  could 
not  come  to  a  unanimous  verdict.  It  had  been  said, 
and,  I  believe,  with  truth,  that  only  one  juror  stood 
out  in  Wilde's  favour.  In  any  case,  there  was  the 
fact  of  no  verdict,  and  the  authorities  had  to  con- 
sider their  position.  They  decided  to  have  a  new 
trial,  and  Wilde  was  taken  back  to  Holloway.  It 
was  arranged  that  he  should  be  admitted  to  bail 
until  the  new  trial  took  place  if  sureties  to  the 


The  Wilde  Trials  101 

amount  of  two  thousand  five  hundred  pounds  were 
forthcoming.  My  brother  Percy,  then  Lord  Doug- 
las of  Hawick  and  now  Marquis  of  Queensberry, 
and  the  Rev.  Stuart  Headlam  became  bail  for  the 
amount. 

I  have  often  thought  that  the  supremely  tragical 
period  of  Wilde's  life  was  not  the  moment  of  his 
taking  action  against  my  father,  as  he  suggested, 
but  the  period  during  which  he  was  out  on  bail  with 
the  second  trial  looming  ahead  of  him.  I  have 
reason  for  knowing  that  Wilde  looked  upon  the  dis- 
agreement of  the  jury  as  a  sort  of  verdict  in  his 
favour,  and  was  under  the  impression  that  he  stood 
a  very  good  sporting  chance  of  being  found  not 
guilty  at  the  second  trial.  It  is  notorious  that  per- 
sons afflicted  with  Wilde's  particular  type  of 
viciousness  are  for  ever  believing  that  the  world 
will  one  day  condone  and  even  approve  of  them. 
Wilde  looked  upon  the  one  juryman  who  refused 
to  find  him  guilty  not  as  an  honest  Englishman  who 
was  determined  to  satisfy  himself  on  the  evidence, 
but  as  a  friend  or  approver  of  unnameable  wicked- 
ness. He  argued:  ''If  there  was  one  man  of  this 
jury  who  was  with  me  there  is  sure  to  be  one  on  the" 
next,"  and,  as  it  was  evident  that  people  were  be- 
coming tired  of  the  scandal,  and  the  press,  which 
in  the  beginning  had  pursued  him  with  relentless 


102         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

and  bloodthirsty  fierceness,  had  calmed  down  a 
good  deal,  he  began  to  think  that  he  would  get  oflf. 
For  my  own  part,  I  do  not  profess  to  have  had 
great  wisdom,  but  it  happens  that  I  did  not  think 
that  he  would  get  of?  and,  rightly  or  wrongly,  I 
advised  him  to  leave  the  country.  I  wrote  to  my 
brother  Percy  and  asked  him  if  he  would  mind  if 
Wilde  made  a  bolt  of  it.  The  matter  was  put  to 
Wilde  and  he  refused  to  budge.  His  brother  is 
reputed  to  have  said :  ''Oscar  is  an  Irish  gentleman 
and  will  face  the  music.''  It  has  been  held  up  to 
him  for  nobility  that  he  did  remain,  and  I  have 
frequently  seen  it  stated  that  he  remained  because 
he  did  not  wish  to  be  dishonourable  with  respect 
to  his  bail.  His  bail,  however,  would  not  have  com- 
plained if  he  had  gone.  Yet  he  stopped.  Here 
again  the  tragedy  was  entirely  of  his  own  making. 
Even  if  we  are  to  believe  that  Wilde  abandoned 
his  will-power  entirely  to  me  when  he  went  to  Bow 
Street  for  his  warrant,  how  comes  it  to  pass  that 
when  he  was  at  Oakley  Street  without  a  shilling  or 
a  friend  and  a  public  exposure  behind  him  of  the 
like  no  man  ever  had  in  all  history,  his  will-power 
suddenly  reasserts  itself?  I  have  been  blamed  for 
suggesting  that  he  should  go  away.  On  the  other 
hand,  the  very  people  who  blamed  me  for  advising 
his  retreat  when  I  knew  that  he  was  guilty,  have 


The  Wilde  Trials  103 

blamed  me  for  not  advising  him  to  get  away  when 
I  supposed  him  to  be  innocent.  I  take  no  shame 
whatever  for  having  advised  him  as  I  did.  His 
withdrawal  to  France  would  have  cost  my  brother 
two  thousand  five  hundred  pounds,  and  heaven 
alone  knows  what  it  would  have  cost  me  in  hard 
money;  but  it  would  have  saved  Wilde  two  years 
of  imprisonment  and  it  would  have  saved  literature 
from  the  ultimate  degradation  at  his  hands.  For  it 
is  obvious  that,  if  he  had  remained  a  free  man,  he 
would  not  have  degraded  himself  and  the  English 
language  by  writing  ''De  Profundis." 

I  have  already  produced  the  statement  of  one 
of  Wilde's  biographers  as  to  the  manner  in  which 
Wilde  and  his  companions  are  alleged  to  have  spent 
the  hours  between  the  collapse  of  the  case  against 
Lord  Queensberry  and  Wilde's  arrest;  but  I  should 
like  once  more  to  call  attention  to  the  sentence  about 
the  police  knocking  at  the  door  of  the  sitting-room 
at  the  Cadogan  Arms  and  the  ''blanched  faces"  and 
''sudden  surprise"  of  Wilde  and  his  companions. 
Here  is  another  account  of  what  happened:  "Oscar 
Wilde  had  spent  that  afternoon  in  a  private  sitting- 
room  at  a  hotel,  smoking  cigarettes,  drinking 
whisky  and  soda  and  reading  now  the  Yellow  Book 
and  now  evening  papers.  He  evinced  neither  dis- 
may nor  trepidation  when  the  officers  entered  the 


104         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

room^  and,  on  alighting  from  the  cab  at  Scotland 
Yard,  he  had  a  courteous  discussion  with  one  of 
the  detectives  about  the  payment  of  the  cab."  It 
will  interest  the  reader  to  know  that  both  these 
accounts,  though  they  are  diametrically  opposed  one 
to  the  other,  are  the  work  of  the  same  person — 
namely,  Robert  Harborough  Sherard. 

It  is  the  same  Mr.  Sherard  who  tells  the  follow- 
ing fearful  and  wonderful  anecdote:  ''Late  in  the 
afternoon  of  the  following  day,  Saturday,  25th 
May,  1895,  Oscar  Wilde  was  found  guilty  and  sen- 
tenced to  two  years'  hard  labour.  There  had  been 
six  counts  against  him.  He  was  asked  after  his 
release  by  a  very  old  friend  as  to  the  justice  of  the 
finding,  and  he  said:  Tive  of  the  counts  referred 
to  matters  with  which  I  had  absolutely  nothing  to 
do.  There  was  some  foundation  for  one  of  the 
counts.'  'But  then,  why,'  asked  his  friend,  'did  you 
not  instruct  your  defenders?'  'That  would  have 
meant  betraying  a  friend,'  said  Oscar.  Circum- 
stances which  have  since  transpired  have  estab- 
lished— what  for  the  rest  was  never  in  doubt  in  the 
minds  of  those  who  heard  it  made — the  absolute 
truth  of  this  statement." 

Presuming  that  Wilde  said  this,  he  must  have 
taken  for  granted  that  "those  who  heard  him"  had 
suddenly  become  idiots.    The  six  counts  of  the  in- 


DRAWING   OF   LORD  ALFRED  DOUGLAS,    AT   THE 
AGE   OF  TWENTY-FOUR 


The  Wilde  Trials  105 

dictment  bore  reference  to  his  improper  relations 
with  different  persons,  all  of  whom  were  produced 
in  the  witness-box  and  gave  their  evidence  in 
Wilde's  presence.  If  a  friend  had  been  involved  in 
the  slightest  way,  that  friend's  name  would  most 
assuredly  have  leaked  out  in  the  course  of  the  pro- 
ceedings, and  if  twenty  friends  had  been  involved 
and  their  names  had  been  kept  secret,  Wilde's  posi- 
tion would  not  have  been  bettered  in  the  slightest 
degree  or  his  guilt  any  the  less  plainly  established. 
Wilde  was  not  of  the  stuff  that  goes  to  hard  labour 
with  the  name  of  a  friend  in  his  bosom  when,  by 
mentioning  that  name,  he  could  have  cleared  him- 
self. His  whole  principle  of  life  was  subversive 
to  any  such  high  altruism ;  he  would  not  have  gone 
without  his  dinner  to  save  a  friend — much  less  have 
faced  ruin  and  imprisonment. 


CHAPTER  VIII 

HARD    LABOUR   AND   AFTER 

TO  say  that  I  was  distressed  by  the  sentence 
of  two  years'  imprisonment  with  hard 
labour,  imposed  upon  Wilde  by  a  Judge 
who  seemed  to  be  absolutely  without  mercy,  is  to 
put  a  mild  term  upon  my  condition  of  anguish. 
Wilde  and  his  supporters  never  ceased  to  suggest 
that  the  whole  thing  was  my  fault.  They  never 
blamed  him  for  what  he  had  done,  but  went  about 
calling  my  father  opprobrious  names  and  asserting 
that  I  had  been  Wilde's  ruin.  It  pleased  them  to 
have  a  scapegoat  upon  whom  to  shift  the  moral 
responsibilities  of  this  big  fat  man  and,  with  the 
help  of  a  foolish  letter  or  two  which  I  had  written 
at  moments  of  great  stress,  they  shifted  them  to 
some  purpose.  I  have  no  desire  to  be  mealy- 
mouthed  about  the  suggestions  which  have  been 
made,  and  I  will  say  right  out  what  impression 
it  is  that  these  people  have  tried  to  create  from  the 
time  that  Wilde  went  to  prison.    They  have  sug- 

io6 


Hard  Labour  and  After  107 

gested  that  I,  Alfred  Bruce  Douglas,  was  a  partner 
in  the  vices  of  which  Wilde  was  charged  and  con- 
victed. There  has  been  more  or  less  established  the 
legend  that  it  was  I  who  took  him  from  the  path  of 
rectitude  and  introduced  him  to  the  kennels  of  foul- 
ness; and  the  impression  has  been  created  that  I 
led  a  debauched  life  with  him  prior  to  his  imprison- 
ment and  that,  when  he  came  out  and  was  willing 
to  mend  his  ways  and  be  reconciled  to  his  wife,  it 
was  I  who  seduced  him  and  dragged  him  back  to 
his  old  villainies.  I  observe  that  Mr.  Ransome  has 
the  following  note  to  the  edition  of  his  critical  study 
which  has  lately  been  published  at  a  shilling:  "The 
publication  of  this  book  in  1912  was  the  subject  of 
a  libel  action  which  was  brought  against  me  in  the 
King's  Bench  Division  of  the  High  Court  of  Jus- 
tice, and  was  heard  before  Mr.  Justice  Darling  and 
a  Special  Jury  on  four  days  in  April,  1913.  In  that 
action  a  verdict  was  given  in  my  favour.  In  bring- 
ing out  this  new  edition  I  have  considered  the  ques- 
tion of  reprinting  the  book  in  its  original  form,  as  I 
have  a  perfect  right  to  do;  but  as  I  do  not  consider 
that  the  passages  complained  of  are  essential  to 
the  critical  purpose  of  my  book,  I  have  decided,  in 
order  to  spare  the  feelings  of  those  who  might  be 
pained  by  the  further  publication  of  those  passages, 
to  omit  them  from  this  edition." 


108         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

Mr.  Ransome's  desire  to  spare  people's  feelings 
by  omitting  from  his  book  what  is  not  true  is  won- 
derfully creditable  to  him ;  but  the  fact  remains  that 
he  asserted  in  his  first  edition  that  Wilde  owed 
some,  at  least,  of  the  circumstances  of  his  public 
disgrace  to  me,  while  the  exquisite  Mr.  Sherard 
goes  further  and  embellishes  his  "authoritative'' 
life  with  the  following  passage :  "He  was  then  living 
in  Naples.  The  circumstances  under  which  he  had 
been  obliged  to  leave  Berneval  and  return  to  the 
least  desirable  companionship  that  the  zvorld  of  men 
offered  to  his  choice  are  summed  up  in  the  follow- 
ing sentence  by  the  author  of  Twenty  Years  in 
Paris' :  The  time  came,  however,  when,  being  with- 
out money,  repulsed,  desolate,  he  could  no  longer 
resist  entreaties  which  offered  to  him  companion- 
ship in  the  place  of  utter  loneliness,  friendship  in 
the  place  of  hostility,  homage  in  the  place  of  insult 
and,  in  the  place  of  impending  destitution,  a  luxuri- 
ous and  elegant  hospitality.'  " 

It  is  well  known  that  it  was  I  who  offered  him  a 
sanctuary  at  Naples  when  his  money  had  run  out 
and  he  was  reduced  to  a  paltry  allowance  of  two 
pounds  nineteen  and  sixpence  a  week;  and  I  sub- 
mit that  the  sentence  italicised  in  the  above-quoted 
passage  is  intended  to  mean — and  can  only  mean — 
one  thing;  while  Ransome's  assertion  is  capable  of 


Hard  Labour  and  After  109 

the  worst  interpretation.  And  now  we  come  to  the 
inner  secret  of  the  whole  of  the  abominable  busi- 
ness. When  Wilde  went  to  prison  I  was  in  France, 
by  his  own  request.  I  wrote  to  him  the  moment 
I  heard  of  the  sentence,  and  there  can  be  no  doubt 
whatever  that,  up  to  this  point,  we  were  good 
friends  and  that  he  counted  me  his  chiefest  and 
dearest  friend.  I  set  to  work  immediately  to  do 
what  I  could  for  him  in  the  way  of  trying  to  get 
his  sentence  reduced,  and  trying  to  obtain  for  him 
special  privileges  in  prison.  In  pursuance  of  my 
promise  and  my  natural  desire  to  stick  to  him 
through  thick  and  thin,  I  even  went  the  length  of 
writing  to  certain  newspapers  with  a  view  to  show- 
ing that  what  he  had  done  would  not  have  been 
considered  so  very  terrible  by  many  eminent  people ; 
that  his  offence  was  no  offence  at  all  in  France,  and 
that  his  sentence  was  altogether  out  of  proportion 
to  his  crime  when  one  came  to  consider  the  amount 
of  suffering  a  sentence  of  two  years'  hard  labour 
would  entail  upon  a  man  of  his  nature  and  tem- 
perament. 

In  addition  to  engaging  myself  in  these  efforts 
on  Wilde's  behalf,  I  was  kept  continually  busy  re- 
pelling all  sorts  of  stupid  attacks  on  myself. 
Wilde's  conviction  and  the  curiosity  and  scandal 
aroused  by  what  transpired  at  the  trial  seems  to 


110         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

have  driven  the  whole  of  Paris  into  a  state  of  mad- 
ness for  the  time  being.  Statements  of  the  most 
ridiculous  kind  about  Wilde  and  myself  were  pub- 
lished broadcast — articles  were  printed  which  pur- 
ported to  be  written  by  me  and  were  signed  in  my 
name,  though  I  had  never  so  much  as  seen  them; 
and  one  paper  went  the  length  of  printing  a  number 
of  gallant  letters  which  I  was  alleged  to  have  ad- 
dressed to  a  certain  well-known  demi-mondaine — 
a  lady,  by  the  way,  to  whom  I  had  never  written 
or  spoken  in  my  life.  I  spent  a  great  deal  of  time 
and  temper  in  endeavouring  to  cope  with  these 
matters :  I  challenged  various  people  to  duels  and  I 
took  actions  at  law  against  various  newspapers. 
But  I  soon  found  that  it  was  next  door  to  impossible 
to  keep  track  of  my  traducers  and  that  I  might 
easily  have  spent  the  rest  of  my  life  in  litigation 
without  obtaining  redress. 

About  this  time  I  wrote  for  the  Mercure  de 
France  an  article  about  Wilde  which  might  have 
done  him  a  certain  amount  of  good  in  the  literary 
sense.  Sherard  heard  in  some  way  that  this  article 
had  been  written ;  he  mentioned  it  to  Wilde  in  prison 
and,  on  the  strength  of  what  Wilde  said,  Sherard 
wrote  me  a  letter  stating  that  Wilde  desired  that 
the  article  should  not  appear.  I  gave  Sherard  his 
immediate  and  proper  answer  and,  as  it  was  noth- 


Hard  Labour  and  After  111 

ing  to  me  whether  the  article  appeared  or  not,  unless 
Wilde  wished  it  to  appear,  I  arranged  with  the 
Mercure  de  France  that  it  should  not  be  printed. 
In  the  meantime,  I  decided  to  go  to  England  and 
to  visit  Wilde  in  prison,  in  order  that  we  might 
talk  generally  of  his  affairs.  I  wrote  informing 
Robert  Ross  of  my  intention  and,  in  reply,  he  told 
me  that  he  had  just  come  from  Wilde  and  that,  as 
his  correspondence  and  visitors  were  strictly  lim- 
ited, he  desired  that  I  should  neither  write  to  him 
nor  visit  him.  I  said  that  I  thought  such  a  request 
ought  to  have  come  to  me  directly  from  Wilde — 
either  by  word  of  mouth  or  by  letter — but  Ross  told 
me  that  prisoners  were  allowed  to  write  only  a  lim- 
ited number  of  letters  in  the  year,  and  to  see  only  a 
limited  number  of  visitors  and  that  he  had  already 
written  as  many  letters  as  he  was  entitled  to  write 
and  would  be  unable  either  to  receive  letters  or 
visitors  for  some  time  to  come.  I  was  very  much 
upset  on  receiving  this  news,  and  I  had  some 
thought  of  trying  to  obtain  an  interview  with  Wilde 
through  influence  which  I  possessed ;  but  I  was  told 
that  it  would  be  bad  for  Wilde  if  I  did  so,  and  I 
accordingly  determined  to  follow  out  his  wishes  and 
to  wait  until  he  could  write  or  send  to  me.  I  sub- 
sequently went  to  Naples  and  occupied  myself  with 
literary   pursuits,   getting  together   a   volume   of 


112         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

poetry  which  I  proposed  to  pubHsh  and  dedicate  to 
Wilde. 

Now  it  is  quite  clear  that  during  the  latter  part 
of  his  imprisonment  Wilde  laboured  under  the  im- 
pression that  my  silence  and  my  failure  to  visit 
him  were  due  to  carelessness,  indifference  and 
apathy  on  my  part.  Either  he  did  not  know,  or 
pretended  not  to  know,  of  the  precise  intimations 
given  to  me  not  to  visit  or  write  to  him.  As  he  did 
not  hear  from  me,  he  concluded  that  I  had  forsaken 
him.  This  filled  him  with  a  violent  anger,  and  he 
set  to  work  and  wrote  ''De  Profundis."  His  rage 
and  hate  apparently  knew  no  limits,  and  Sherard 
published  a  letter  of  Mrs.  Wilde's,  in  which  she 
states  that  she  had  seen  her  husband  in  prison  and 

that  he  had  said  that  if  he  could  get  hold  of , 

meaning  myself,  he  would  kill  him. 

And  all  this  time  I  was  thinking  hourly  of  the 
man  who  had  been  my  friend  and  counting  the  days 
to  the  time  of  his  release.  I  had  steady  reports  of 
him  from  Ross,  but  never  a  word  or  a  hint  that  he 
was  angry  with  me  or  that  I  had  done  anything 
to  offend  him,  until  he  had  nearly  completed  his  sen- 
tence. The  only  indication  of  the  sort  that  came 
my  way  was  in  the  matter  of  the  dedication  of  my 
first  volume  of  poems.  Ross  wrote  to  say  that 
Wilde  felt  that  it  would  be  better  if  I  did  not  dedi- 


Hard  Labour  and  After  113 

cate  the  book  to  him;  and,  as  he  wished  it,  I  re- 
frained and  issued  the  book  without  any  dedication 
at  all. 

Of  Wilde  in  prison  we  have  had  many  touching 
and  woeful  pictures.  Sherard  has  a  passage  about 
it  which,  in  the  circumstances,  is  worth  quoting: 
"In  Wandsworth  Prison  first  and  then  in  Reading 
Gaol,  Oscar  Wilde's  mental  development  reached 
a  point  of  transcendency  to  which  never  in  the 
world  of  men  he  could  have  hoped  to  attain.  There 
had  been  forced  upon  him  the  recluse  life  which 
had  raised  many  men  in  the  world's  history  towards 
the  stars,  but  which,  perhaps,  never  before  demon- 
strated its  reforming  and  enhancing  powers  in  a 
manner  more  magnificent,  more  orbicular,  more  tri- 
umphant. In  the  old  days  he  had  tried  to  imitate 
Balzac  in  his  mode  of  life ;  but  Society  and  Pleasure 
had  ever  knocked  at  the  door  of  his  cell,  nor  had 
he  the  strength  of  will  great  enough  to  resist  their 
allurements.  Now  there  were  iron  bars  between 
him  and  the  wasteful  pleasures  of  the  world:  a 
claustration  as  strict,  if  less  severe,  than  that  which 
Balzac  imposed  upon  himself,  held  him  fast,  and  he 
had  the  time  to  think.  He  had  the  time  to  think, 
and  with  a  brain  which  at  last  had  recovered  its 
splendid  normal  power.  The  prison  regime,  the 
enforced  temperance  in  food,  the  enforced  abstin- 


114         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

ence  from  all  narcotic  drugs  and  drink,  the  regular 
hours,  the  periodical  exercise — the  simple  life,  in 
one  word — had  restored  him  the  splendid  heritage 
that  he  had  received  from  nature.  What  the  real 
Oscar  Wilde  was,  and  of  what  he  was  capable,  was 
now  to  be  made  patent.  In  'De  Profundis'  he  laid 
his  soul  bare,  and  the  impartial  are  to  judge  from 
that  book  of  the  man's  new  powers  as  a  thinker 
and  as  a  literary  artist.  His  friends  will  ask  no 
more  than  that,  reserving  to  themselves  the  high 
delight  of  taking  a  holy  joy  in  the  lofty  virtues 
which  that  book  reveals,  the  kindness,  the  patience, 
the  resignation,  the  forgiveness  of  sins  so  splendid 
that  one  may  almost  believe  that  in  his  ardent  medi- 
tations on  Christ  he  was  able  to  bring  the  bodily 
presence  of  the  God  who  taught  these  things  into 
his  cell,  and  to  learn  from  the  divine  lips  themselves 
what  is  the  true  secret  of  human  happiness.  Critics 
abroad  have  said :  There  is  too  much  about  Christ 
in  "De  Profundis,"  '  overlooking  the  fact  that  the 
book  is,  from  the  first  page  to  the  last,  inspired  by 
Christ — that  no  man  who  had  not  found  Christ 
could  have  written  that  book,  nor  lived  as  the  man 
who  wrote  it  did  live.  In  England,  one  heard  it 
said  that  it  is  absurd  to  believe  that  an  agnostic,  a 
sensualist  would  turn  to  religion,  and  the  blas- 
phemous statement  has  been  made  that  this  book 


Hard  Labour  and  After  115 

is,  in  its  way,  no  more  sincere  than  the  dying  con- 
fessions of  many  prison  cells,  the  greasy  cant  that 
officious  chaplains  win  from  fawning  prisoners. 
One  has  heard  the  word  HYPOCRISY  pro- 
nounced." This  is  very  precious  writing  and  quite 
typical  of  the  ecstatic  frame  of  mind  of  the  average 
Wilde  enthusiast.  Unlike  Mr.  Ransome,  however, 
Mr.  Sherard  does  not  appear  to  have  had  the  ad- 
vantage of  knowing  that  the  published  "De  Pro- 
fundis,"  which  aroused  him  to  such  a  pitch  of 
pietistic  fervour,  is  merely  a  collection  of  elegant 
extracts.  A  perusal  of  the  extracts  from  the  com- 
plete "De  Profundis''  published  in  reports  of  the 
Ransome  trial  would  have  convinced  him  that  this 
saint-like  inhabitant  of  Wandsworth  and  Reading 
gaols  was  indeed  a  hypocrite  of  the  most  hypo- 
critical dye,  and  that  the  "De  Profundis''  was  in- 
deed "no  more  sincere  than  the  dying  confessions 
of  many  prison  cells,  the  greasy  cant  that  officious 
chaplains  wring  from  fawning  prisoners."  Nay,  it 
was  worse  than  this,  for  the  design  of  the  canting 
deceiver  of  prison  chaplains  is  not  usually  to  hurt 
other  people,  whereas  Wilde's  design  was  utterly 
to  destroy  the  reputation  and  good  name  of  a  man 
who  had  befriended  him ;  and  to  do  this  in  such  a 
way  that  he  might  still  continue  to  obtain  kindness 
and  money  from  the  object  of  his  hatred  and  leave 


116         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

him  absolutely  without  a  word  of  defence  in  his 
lifetime.  I  say  that  Oscar  Wilde  conceived  this 
horrible  and  unheard-of  plot  in  his  unreasoning 
rage  at  what  he  conceived  to  be  my  attitude  towards 
him,  and  I  say  that  Mr.  Robert  Ross,  who  professed 
great  friendship  for  me  both  then  and  until  long 
after  Wilde's  death,  did  nothing  to  make  Wilde's 
plot  ineffective,  or  even  to  warn  me  of  it.  On  the 
contrary,  he  presented  the  unpublished  parts  of 
'*De  Profundis"  to  the  authorities  at  the  British 
Museum  on  the  understanding  that  it  was  to  re- 
main sealed  up  only  until  the  year  1960.  However, 
I  shall  deal  with  the  whole  question  of  ''De  Pro- 
fundis"  in  a  separate  chapter.  My  main  point  here 
is  to  show  plainly  what  has  been  brought  to  my 
charge,  and  to  show  how  the  people  who  bring  these 
charges  stultify  themselves.  Nobody  who  reads 
Mr.  Ransome's  book  before  (out  of  the  kindness 
of  his  heart)  he  removed  his  aspersions  on  me,  could 
doubt  for  a  moment  that  he  wished  to  convey  the 
impression  that  I  had  a  bad  influence  upon  Wilde 
and  that  it  was  this  bad  influence  that  brought 
Wilde  to  grief  and  prevented  him  from  rehabili- 
tating himself  after  his  release.  Yet  it  is  this  same 
Mr.  Ransome — who  tells  his  readers  in  his  preface 
that  he  is  indebted  to  Mr.  Ross  for  verifications  of 
his  biographical  facts — who  gives  us  the  following 


Hard  Labour  and  After  117 

precise  details  as  to  ''the  intensification  of  Wilde's 
personality"  when  he  became  a  habitual  devotee  of 
the  vice  for  which  he  was  imprisoned :  ''He  had  first 
experimented  in  that  vice,''  says  Ransome,  'Hn 
1886;  his  experiments  became  a  habit  in  1889." 
Well,  in  1886  I  was  a  boy,  fifteen  years  of  age,  at 
Winchester  School,  and  I  had  never  so  much  as 
heard  of  Oscar  Wilde;  whereas  in  1889  I  was 
eighteen  years  of  age  and  in  the  south  of  France 
with  a  tutor,  and  was  not  to  meet  Wilde — whose 
name  was  still  unknown  to  me — till  nearly  three 
years  later.  So  that  by  the  time  we  did  meet  he 
had  already  found  his  way  to  the  lowest  moral 
depths  without  my  juvenile  assistance.  It  is  to  be 
noted  further  that  both  Ross  and  Sherard  knew 
Wilde  long  before  I  did;  and,  according  to  their 
own  showing,  were  his  constant  and  faithful  com- 
panions until  I  arrived  on  the  scene.  Both  of  them 
swear  that  they  never  heard  him  use  an  objection- 
able phrase  or  an  obscene  remark,  and  that  they 
had  no  inkling  of  his  aberration.  Whereas  I,  a  cal- 
low undergraduate  from  Oxford,  with  so  simple 
an  outlook  upon  life  that,  in  spite  of  my  classical 
training,  I  never  clearly  understood  the  nature  of 
Wilde's  viciousness  till  the  time  of  the  trials,  am 
alleged  to  have  known  everything  and  to  have  been 


118         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

the  prime  mover   in  events  v^hich   had  occurred 
years  before  I  was  on  the  scene  at  all. 

Then  again,  let  us  take  the  accounts  of  v^hat  hap- 
pened immediately  after  Wilde  came  out  of  prison. 
During  the  time  of  his  incarceration  some  sympa- 
thiser or  other — a  lady,  by  the  way — put  up  a  thou- 
sand pounds  for  the  use  of  Wilde,  so  that  he  might 
have  money  by  him  while  he  was  in  prison  and  a 
sufficient  sum  to  face  the  world  with  when  he  came 
out.  There  can  be  no  doubt  whatever  that  Wilde 
had  at  least  eight  hundred  pounds  at  his  command 
on  the  day  he  left  prison.  Ransome  tells  us  that 
he  "immediately  crossed  the  Channel  for  Dieppe, 
where  he  stayed  for  some  days  and  drove  about  with 
Mr.  Robert  Ross  and  Mr.  Reginald  Turner,  exam- 
ining the  surrounding  villages,  most  of  which 
seemed  uninhabitable.''  At  the  end  of  a  week  he 
took  rooms  in  the  inn  at  the  little  hamlet  of  Berne- 
val.  Then  he  took  a  chalet  for  the  season  and 
talked  about  building  a  house.  "He  asked  for  his 
pictures  and  Japanese  gold-paper  that  should  pro- 
vide a  fitting  background  for  lithographs  by 
Rothenstein  and  Shannon."  Sherard  tells  us  that 
at  Berneval  his  resources  melted  away  in  his  hands. 
"He  spent  money  with  the  recklessness  of  sailors 
on  shore  and  prisoners  free  of  gaol.  ...  In  inviting 
friends  to  visit  him  at  Berneval,  he  used  to  ask  those 


Hard  Labour  and  After  119 

who  were  married  to  bring  their  wives  with  them. 
.  .  .  He  showed  himself,  to  those  who  had  the 
privilege  of  seeing  him  during  the  weeks  he  spent  in 
Berneval,  a  gentleman,  a  hero,  and  a  Christian  T 
Doubtless!  The  italics  are  mine  and  I  make  no 
comment.  I  was  in  Paris  and,  later,  in  Aix-les- 
Bains  with  my  mother  during  the  brief,  bright, 
brotherly  Berneval  weeks,  when  Oscar  Wilde  was 
getting  rid  of  the  last  of  his  substance  and  throwing 
out  of  the  window,  as  it  were,  the  money  which 
should  have  been  used  reasonably  to  maintain  him 
until  he  could  cast  about  for  work.  I  heard  from 
Wilde  that  he  was  all  right  and  going  well  and 
strong,  and  that  he  had  ''dear  so-and-so"  and  ''dear 
so-and-so''  to  visit  him.  Several  letters  passed  be- 
tween us,  and  he  kept  on  saying  that  he  would  come 
to  see  me.  Ultimately,  when  I  had  decided  to  take 
a  villa  at  Naples,  it  was  arranged  that  Wilde  should 
visit  me  there.  Just  before  I  started  for  Naples,  I 
got  a  long  letter,  in  which  he  explained  that  he  had 
spent  his  last  shilling,  that  all  his  friends  were  gone, 
and  that  he  hadn't  even  sufficient  money  to  pay  his 
fare  to  Naples.  I  telegraphed  a  sufficient  sum  to 
cover  his  expenses  and  he  joined  me  there  at  the 
Royal  Hotel.  Soon  after  I  moved  into  the  Villa 
Giudice  at  Posilippo,  taking  Wilde  with  me.  In  less 
than  three  months  at  Berneval  he  had  got  through 


120         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

eight  hundred  pounds,  and  he  came  to  me  penniless, 
excepting  for  what  I  had  myself  given  him.  It  is 
suggested  that  his  coming  to  Naples  was  the  result 
of  frantic  appeals  and  persuasions  on  my  part.  In 
point  of  fact,  he  came  because  he  had  nowhere  else 
to  go  and  because  nobody  else  would  have  him.  He 
required  neither  ''luring"  nor  "tempting" — which 
he  certainly  would  not  have  had  from  me,  in  any 
case — and  he  was  very  glad  to  find  a  refuge  in  my 
establishment. 

There  is  just  one  other  point,  and  I  shall  have 
done  with  this  very  unpleasant  part  of  my  subject. 
The  people  who  suggest  that  in  some  unexplained 
manner  I  was  the  means  of  separating  Wilde  from 
his  wife  forget  that  Wilde  left  prison  in  May,  J  897, 
and  did  not  join  me  at  Naples  until  the  end  of 
August  of  the  same  year.  We  have  seen  that  im- 
mediately on  his  release  from  prison  he  went  to 
Dieppe  and  was  driving  about  with  Ross  and 
Turner.  Why  did  they  not  take  him  to  his  wife? 
They  were  with  him  for  weeks  at  Berneval,  and  so 
was  Sherard.  Why  was  the  reconciliation — which 
Sherard  professes  to  have  laboured  like  Hercules 
to  arrange — never  brought  about?  Of  course,  the 
answer  is  Alfred  Douglas  stood  between  them.  The 
fact  is,  that  Alfred  Douglas  did  nothing  of  the  sort. 
What  actually  happened  was  this:  Wilde  never 


Hard  Labour  and  After  121 

dreamed  of  rejoining  Mrs.  Wilde  or  becoming 
reconciled  to  her  while  his  money  lasted.  When  his 
money  was  spent  he  wrote  to  Ross  and  asked  if 
more  could  not  be  raised.  Ross  replied  that  nothing 
more  could  be  done.  Wilde  then  wrote  to  his  wife 
to  enquire  if  she  would  receive  him  as  her  husband. 
Wilde  asserted  that  she  sent  him  a  reply  full  of 
hums  and  haws  and  imposed  a  number  of  what  he 
described  as  absurd  conditions.  The  letter  drove 
him  into  a  fury  and,  I  believe,  he  never  wrote  again 
to  her  in  his  life,  or  she  to  him.  The  plain  fact  is — 
as  the  unpublished  part  of  ''De  Profundis"  shows — 
that  Wilde  had  never  forgiven  me  for  what  he  be- 
lieved to  be  my  neglect  of  him  while  he  was  in 
prison ;  and  that  if  the  supplies  of  money  had  held 
out,  he  would  never  have  come  near  me.  But  when 
he  found  that  his  admirers  and  supporters  in  Lon- 
don were  not  disposed  to  keep  him  in  the  lap  of 
luxury  at  Berneval,  and  that  they  considered  his 
miserable  pittance  of  under  three  pounds  a  week 
sufficient  for  him  to  live  upon,  his  thoughts  turned 
towards  Naples,  where  he  knew  no  such  views  of 
economy  were  likely  to  prevail.  He  came  to  me  on 
false  pretences,  because  he  knew  that  ''De  Pro- 
fundis''  had  not  been  destroyed  and,  from  that  time 
forward  to  the  day  of  his  death,  I  had  the  honour 
and  pleasure  of  supporting  him. 


CHAPTER  IX 

NAPLES  AND  PARIS 

WHEN  Wilde  came  to  the  Villa  Giudice 
he  was  in  fair  health  and  reasonable 
spirits.  That  he  had  eaten  and  drunk 
too  much  at  Berneval  he  freely  admitted,  but  on 
the  whole  he  was  in  good  physical  condition.  From 
the  end  of  August  to  the  middle  of  November  he 
had  the  run  of  my  villa  as  my  guest,  and  I  paid 
the  whole  of  the  housekeeping  expenses,  including 
the  tradesmen's  bills  for  food  and  wine,  the  ser- 
vants' wages,  and  so  forth,  to  which  expenses  Wilde 
never  so  much  as  contributed  a  farthing  piece.  So 
far  as  I  am  aware,  the  life  he  lived  here  was  per- 
fectly proper  and  without  reproach.  He  had 
brought  with  him  from  Berneval  a  rough  draft 
of  part  of  the  "Ballad  of  Reading  Gaol,"  which  he 
read  to  me.  It  has  been  stated  on  supposed  author- 
ity that  Wilde  composed  none  of  the  ''Ballad  of 
Reading  Gaol"  during  the  time  of  his  imprison- 
ment. He  told  me  that  he  had  composed  certain 
of  the  stanzas  in  prison  and  he  added  to  them  at 

122 


Naples  and  Paris  123 

Berneval.  But  there  can  be  no  question  that  the 
poem  was  completed  at  Naples.  He  laboured  over 
it  in  a  manner  which  I  had  never  known  him  to 
labour  before.  Every  word  had  to  be  considered; 
every  rhyme  and  every  cadence  carefully  pondered. 
I  had  "Ballad  of  Reading  GaoF'  for  breakfast,  din- 
ner and  tea,  and  for  many  weeks  it  was  almost  our 
sole  topic  of  conversation.  For  my  own  part,  I,  too, 
was  busy  with  literary  work,  and  I  wrote  at  Naples 
during  this  period  some  of  my  best  sonnets,  and 
occupied  myself  with  various  translations.  We  had 
not  an  idle  week  during  the  whole  time  we  were 
together.  It  was  one  of  the  charges  against  me  in 
the  Ransome  case  that  I  hindered  Wilde  in  his  lit- 
erary production,  and  that  he  never  did  anything 
worth  doing  when  he  was  with  me.  How  maliciously 
false  these  statements  were  may  be  gathered  from 
the  fact  that  he  planned  and  wrote  the  whole  of 
''A  Woman  of  No  Importance"  while  we  were  to- 
gether at  Lady  Mount-Temple's  house  at  Babba- 
combe;  that  he  wrote  the  whole  of  'The  Impor- 
tance of  Being  Earnest"  at  Worthing,  where  we 
shared  a  house;  and  ''The  Ideal  Husband"  partly  at 
Goring,  where  we  shared  a  house,  and  partly  in 
London,  while  we  were  continually  together;  while 
he  composed  and  completed  the  final  version 
of  the  "Ballad  of  Reading  Gaol"  whilst  staying  in 


124         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

my  villa  at  Naples.  I  have  no  desire  to  take  credit 
to  myself  for  another  man's  work,  but  many  collab- 
orations between  authors  have  been  acknowledged 
on  much  less  slender  grounds  than  it  would  be  pos- 
sible for  me  to  set  up  in  the  matter  of  the  aforesaid 
plays  and  of  the  aforesaid  ''Ballad  of  Reading 
Gaol"  if  I  were  disposed  to  do  so.  In  the  ordinary 
course  of  events  I  would  never  have  said  a  single 
word  on  the  subject.  It  seemed  to  me  perfectly 
natural  that,  as  we  were  together,  Wilde  should 
show  me  what  he  was  doing  and  read  me  what 
he  was  writing.  And  as  he  thereby  invited 
advice  and  criticism,  it  seemed  to  be  per- 
fectly natural  that  I  should  give  it,  and  that  he 
should  adopt  it.  The  truth  is  that  Wilde  con- 
sistently made  free  use  of  such  gifts  as  I  possessed, 
that  I  assisted  him  to  many  a  piece  of  dialogue  and 
many  a  gibe  which  has  helped  to  make  him  famous, 
and  that  I  gave  him  very  material  aid  and  counsel 
in  the  matter  of  the  ''Ballad  of  Reading  Gaol.'' 
There  are  passages  in  this  latter  poem  which  he 
lifted  holus-bolus  from  a  poem  of  my  own,  and  it 
must  be  remembered  that,  while  up  to  the  time  that 
he  left  Reading  Gaol,  he  had  affected  some  scorn  of 
the  ballad  form  and  knew  next  to  nothing  of  its 
possibilities,  I  had  given  a  great  amount  of  atten- 
tion to  the  study  of  that  form  and  had  produced 


Naples  and  Paris  125 

the  '^Ballad  of  Perkin  Warbeck^'  and  the  ''Ballad  of 
St.  Vitus" — which  latter  Wilde  read  for  the  first 
time  at  Naples,  and  with  which  he  was  mightily 
impressed.  It  would  be  preposterous  for  me  to 
claim  more  than  my  due  as  regards  the  literary  side 
of  our  friendship,  and  I  had  perhaps  better  put  the 
position  this  way :  I  have  never  denied  that  I  learned 
things  from  Wilde  and  that,  up  to  a  certain  point, 
I  owe  a  good  deal  to  him  in  the  literary  sense.  On 
the  other  hand,  in  view  of  what  he  said,  it  is  neces- 
sary for  me  to  point  out  that  Wilde  owes  just  as 
much  to  me  as  I  owe  to  him  and,  for  that  matter,  a 
great  deal  more.  I  have  written  neither  plays  nor 
poems  which  embody  a  single  word  or  phrase  of  his, 
and  I  never  took  a  literary  hint  from  him  in  my  life. 
He  has  done  me  the  honour  to  use  a  great  deal  of 
Alfred  Douglas,  and  he  is  perfectly  welcome.  All 
I  ask  is,  that  I  may  not  be  maligned  in  consequence. 
Although  our  life  at  the  Villa  Giudice  was  per- 
fectly harmless  and  consisted  mainly  of  fairly 
strenuous  literary  toil,  the  fact  that  we  were  to- 
gether did  not  please  certain  of  Wilde's  friends,  and 
the  scandal-mongers  were  set  busy  again.  How 
easy  it  is  to  make  scandal  was  prettily  illustrated 
by  no  less  a  personage  than  Mr.  Justice  Darling 
during  the  course  of  the  Ransome  trial.  "Are  you 
aware,  Mr.  Campbell,"  said  his  lordship  to  the  de- 


126         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

fending  counsel,  ''are  you  aware  of  the  reputation 
of  Naples?"  Of  course,  Mr.  Campbell  shook  his 
head  in  the  most  deprecatory  manner,  and  the  jury 
made  a  mental  note  that  a  villa  at  Naples  meant  the 
very  lowest  depths  of  wickedness  and  profligacy. 

Anybody  who  knows  Europe  at  all,  knows  per- 
fectly well  that  Naples  was  then,  and  is  now,  a 
resort  of  the  most  exclusive  set  of  the  Italian  aris- 
tocracy, and  that  there  is  a  large  and  highly  re- 
spectable English  colony  there.  My  grandmother, 
the  late  Hon.  Mrs.  Alfred  Montgomery,  lived  there 
for  twenty  years,  and  there  was  not  a  person  of 
position  in  the  place  by  whom  I  was  not  known  or 
with  whom  I  was  not  on  calling  terms  if  I  cared  to 
follow  up  my  social  duties.  There  is  nothing  at  all 
about  the  reputation  of  Naples  to  differentiate  it 
from  Rome  or  Genoa  or  Florence  or  Venice  or  any 
other  Italian  city.  Many  people  of  distinction 
whom  Mr.  Justice  Darling  might  not  be  sorry  to 
know  continue  to  make  a  point  of  going  there  every 
season.  Well,  just  as  there  were  brave  men  before 
Agamemnon,  so  there  were  people  who  could  ferret 
out  scandal  even  from  the  most  harmless  method 
of  life  before  Mr.  Justice  Darling.  Wilde  and  I 
were  together  at  Naples,  and  malice  and  leering 
gossip  were  abroad  with  their  abominable  insinua- 
tions before  one  had  time  to  say  "jackknife."    The 


Naples  and  Paris  127 

reports  naturally  came  to  the  ears  of  my  people, 
who  were  much  distressed  and  upset  by  them ;  and 
it  was  pointed  out  to  me  that  I  was  doing  myself 
great  damage  by  befriending  this  man  and  that  I 
ought  to  send  him  about  his  business.  One  of  the 
attaches  from  the  British  Embassy  at  Rome,  in 
which  city  I  had  spent  the  winter  of  1896  with  my 
mother,  came  to  Naples,  at  the  instigation  of  the 
Ambassador,  expressly  to  see  me,  and  to  urge  on 
me  the  advisability  of  dissociating  myself  from 
Wilde.  He  told  me  that  the  fact  that  I  had  Wilde 
as  a  guest  in  my  house  was  causing  all  sorts  of  un- 
pleasant gossip,  and  he  even  went  so  far  as  to  say 
that  it  was  not  fair  to  them  at  the  Embassy  that  I 
should  persist  in  giving  cause  for  such  gossip,  as 
they  had  all  made  a  point  of  being  civil  and  friendly 
to  me  when  I  was  in  Rome.  I  told  him  that  I  cared 
nothing  for  gossip  and  scandal,  that  I  had  asked 
Wilde  to  stay  with  me  because  he  had  nowhere  else 
to  go  and  was  practically  without  means,  and  that 
it  was  unthinkable  that  in  these  circumstances  I 
should  turn  him  out  of  my  house  simply  because 
evil-minded  people  chose  to  concern  themselves 
with  what  was  no  affair  of  theirs.  He  was  very 
insistent,  and  when  he  found  that  I  was  not  to  be 
moved  he  got  annoyed  with  me,  told  me  I  was  a 
"quixotic  fool"  and  that  I  should  live  to  be  very 


128         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

sorry  for  having  befriended  a  ''beast  like  Wilde/' 
who  would  get  everything  he  could  out  of  me  and 
then  probably  turn  round  and  abuse  me.  I  was 
very  indignant  at  this  prophetic  pronouncement, 
and  we  parted  in  anger.  I  believed  then — and  I 
believe  now — that  my  attitude  was  the  right  one, 
and  the  gentlemanly  one,  in  the  right  sense  of  the 
word.  I  knew  that  Oscar  Wilde  was  hard  at  work 
on  his  poem.  I  believed  that  his  life  was  clean 
and  that  he  had  determined  to  keep  from  his  old 
evil  courses;  and  I  knew  that  my  life  was  just  as 
proper  as  it  always  had  been,  and  I  consequently 
saw  no  reason  for  turning  upon  my  friend.  The 
world  was  welcome  to  shrug  its  shoulders  if  it 
cared  to,  and  I  proposed  to  leave  it  to  its  shrugging. 
But  the  feeling  amongst  my  friends  in  England, 
largely  got  up  and  fomented  by  my  enemies,  ulti- 
mately became  so  strong  that  it  was  proposed  to 
stop  my  financial  supplies  unless  I  consented  to  a 
separation  from  Wilde.  I  was  thus  forced  to 
capitulate;  but  I  did  not  do  so  without  a  struggle 
and  without  making  provision  for  the  man  who 
was  dependent  upon  me.  I  arranged  to  leave  him  at 
the  Villa  Giudice,  the  rent  of  which  had  been  paid 
in  advance,  and  I  arranged  that  my  mother  should 
send  him  two  hundred  pounds,  which  would  enable 
him  to  live  in  comfort  for  a  month  or  two;  and  I 


Naples  and  Paris  129 

further  arranged  to  let  him  have  additional  money 
as  he  wanted  it.  I  make  special  reference  to  the 
sum  of  two  hundred  pounds  because  it  is  a  pay- 
ment which  can  be  authenticated,  and,  in  fact,  was 
authenticated  at  the  Ransome  trial.  It  is  true  that 
at  the  very  moment  when  he  was  writing  to  me  in 
acknowledgment  of  these  sums  and  to  express  his 
gratitude  for  my  kindness,  he  was  complaining  to 
Ross  in  a  letter  produced  at  the  Ransome  trial  that 
I  had  deserted  him  because  his  money  was  done. 
But  every  one  with  the  slightest  knowledge  of 
Wilde's  affairs  knows  perfectly  well  that  all  the 
money  Wilde  had  was  the  allowance  of  two  pounds 
nineteen  and  odd  which  came  to  him  weekly  through 
his  friends. 

The  general  untrustworthiness  of  Wilde's  accu- 
sation is  obvious  on  the  face  of  it.  Any  one  ac- 
quainted with  him  would,  moreover,  have  laughed 
at  his  impudence  in  saying  that  I  expected  him  to 
raise  money.  I  knew  Wilde  too  well  to  expect  him 
to  raise  money,  even  in  his  alleged  palmy  days; 
and  that  I  should  have  been  ass  enough  to  suppose 
that  when  he  came  to  me  at  Naples,  an  ex-convict, 
an  undischarged  bankrupt,  and  on  a  railway  ticket 
that  I  had  paid  for,  he  could  be  financially  useful 
to  me  is  too  ridiculous  for  words.  Yet  Ransome 
gets  into  "the  Critical  Study"  the  following  choice 


130         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

sentences:  "Soon  after  Wilde  left  Berneval  for 
Naples,  those  who  controlled  the  allowance  that 
enabled  him  to  live  with  his  friend,  purposely 
stopped  it.  His  friend,  as  soon  as  there  was  no 
money,  left  him.  'It  was,'  said  Wilde,  'a  most  bitter 
experience  in  a  bitter  life.'  He  went  to  Paris."  The 
last  sentence  should  have  had  an  addendum:  it 
should  have  read:  "He  went  to  Paris  with  two  hun- 
dred pounds  of  Lord  Alfred  Douglas's  money  in  his 
pocket,  which  had  been  sent  to  him  per  Mr.  More 
Adey  and  the  Marchioness  of  Queensberry."  But 
it  doesn't.  Of  course  Wilde  went  to  Paris — and  he 
went  the  moment  he  heard  I  was  proposing  to  live 
there.  It  was  in  December  of  1897  that  he  came 
and  took  an  apartment  at  a  hotel  in  the  Rue  Mar- 
sollier.  A  few  weeks  later  I  came  to  Paris  and 
became  the  tenant  of  a  flat  in  the  Avenue  Kleber. 
He  might  just  as  well  have  lived  at  my  flat  for  the 
use  he  made  of  his  hotel  except  to  sleep  in.  For  a 
whole  year — that  is  to  say,  down  to  the  end  of  1898 
— he  used  my  flat  as  though  it  were  his  own,  in- 
variably turning  up  at  meal-times  when  he  had 
nowhere  else  to  lunch  or  dine,  and  never  failing 
to  extract  from  me  a  good  deal  more  than  I  could, 
at  that  period,  afford  to  give  him  in  the  way  of 
money  to  tide  him  over  his  constant  and  ever- 
recurring  "difficulties."     I  believe  that  from  time 


Naples  and  Paris  131 

to  time  he  picked  up  various  sums  of  money  on 
his  own.  In  January  or  February  of  1898  he  pub- 
lished the  '^Ballad  of  Reading  GaoF'  through 
Leonard  Smithers;  and  later  I  believe  he  obtained 
some  small  advances  of  money  from  theatrical  man- 
agers for  plays  which  he  was  always  going  to  write 
but  of  which  he  never  produced  a  line.  The  rights 
of  one  of  these  he  seems  to  have  sold  for  sums 
varying  from  twenty  to  a  hundred  pounds  to  at 
least  half  a  dozen  different  persons;  and  he  also 
sold  for  small  sums  the  plots  of  two  plays  and  sev- 
eral short  stories  which  have  since  been  given  to 
the  public  by  another  hand.  But  whatever  money 
he  got  did  him  no  good.  A  couple  of  hundred 
francs  would  take  him  away  from  his  dinner  at  the 
Avenue  Kleber  to  do  himself  well  with  a  roaring 
company  of  boidevardiers;  but  the  next  day  he  was 
back  at  lunch,  full  of  complaints  of  the  hardness 
of  the  world  and  full  of  groans  over  his  difficulties. 
I  speedily  came  to  consider  him  in  the  light  of  a 
permanent  pensioner,  and  my  servants  had  instruc- 
tions to  give  him  food,  and  not  infrequently  lent 
him  money  in  my  absence. 

During  1899  and  1900  his  condition  went  from 
bad  to  worse.  At  the  end  of  1899  I  took  a  shooting- 
box  in  Scotland,  jointly  with  my  brother  Douglas 
of  Hawick,  and  I  was  in  Scotland  until  the  death 


132         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

of  my  father  in  January,  1900.  I  came  into  a 
considerable  amount  of  money  under  my  father's 
will,  and  the  very  first  payment  I  made  out  of  my 
inheritance  was  one  hundred  pounds,  which  I  sent 
to  Oscar  Wilde  in  Paris.  Out  of  this  money  he  took 
a  trip  to  Switzerland.  By  the  time  he  came  back 
I  was  at  the  Hotel  Conde  in  Chantilly,  where  I  had 
acquired  a  racing  stable.  Of  course,  I  was  often  in 
Paris,  and  whenever  I  was  there  I  made  a  point 
of  asking  Wilde  to  lunch  or  dine,  and  I  never  left 
him  without  handing  him  sums  of  money.  My  pass- 
books show  that  in  a  single  year  after  the  death 
of  my  father  I  gave  Wilde  nearly  four  hundred 
pounds  in  cheques  alone:  the  figures  appear  in  my 
bank-book  and  were  proved  at  the  Ransome  trial: 
and  I  must  have  given  him  twice  as  much  in  hard 
cash  or  notes.  At  the  very  least  penny,  he  had  from 
me  that  year  quite  a  thousand  pounds  over  and 
above  more  or  less  constant  entertainment.  It  was 
almost  impossible  for  me  to  take  a  meal  with  him 
and  keep  money  in  my  pocket.  He  would  come  to 
the  restaurant  or  hotel  where  we  were  to  meet  with 
a  dejected  and  depressed  look  on  him,  as  who  should 
say:  "Behold,  how  we  are  harassed  and  reduced, 
and  in  what  pain  of  mind  we  exist."  I  would  give 
him  of  the  best  to  cheer  and  comfort  him,  but  his 
spirits  insisted  on  remaining  damp,  and  it  was  only 


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^^^^^^^^^IBL<^^I^^^B 

Naples  and  Paris  133 

with  difficulty  that  one  could  get  a  smile  out  of  him. 
When  the  time  came  for  parting,  if  I  put  my  hand 
in  my  pocket  and  handed  him  five  or  six  hundred 
francs,  well  and  good;  if  not,  he  would  order  an- 
other old  brandy  and  open  up  a  dreadful  tale  as  to 
the  condition  of  his  bill  at  the  hotel,  the  attitude 
of  his  landlord  about  it,  and  his  own  desperation 
and  despair.  In  the  end  I  got  more  or  less  into  the 
habit  of  handing  him  what  I  proposed  to  give  him 
before  we  proceeded  to  refresh  ourselves.  I  found 
that  by  this  means  the  old  Oscar  Wilde  was  brought 
to  the  front,  and  we  could  talk  pleasantly  together, 
as  gentlemen  should. 

I  remember  a  certain  occasion  on  which  one  of 
our  sittings  had  been  prolonged  until  a  very  late 
hour.  I  had  taken  the  precaution  to  hand  him  a 
note  for  a  thousand  francs  before  we  sat  down  to 
dine.  He  took  his  usual  abundant  share  of  the  good 
things,  and  we  talked  and  laughed  over  our  string 
of  liqueurs  and  let  dull  care  go  his  own  way.  When 
I  called  for  the  bill,  Wilde  suddenly  pulled  a  long 
and  piteous  face.  "My  dear  boy,"  he  said,  ''money 
— ah ! — money.  I  hate  to  distress  you,  but  I  really 
must  have  a  thousand  francs  now.  I  cannot  return 
to  my  hotel  unless  I  have  with  me  money  to  pay  at 
least  a  part  of  the  bill.  I  don't  mind  telling  you 
that  I  am  without  a  penny  in  the  world,  and  if  I 


134         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

do  not  go  to  the  hotel  to-night  I  shall  be  homeless." 
''But,  my  dear  Oscar/'  I  said,  '1  have  just  given 
you  a  thousand  francs,  which  you  put  in  your 
pocket."  He  looked  at  me  as  one  amazed  and  then 
burst  into  a  fit  of  coughing  laughter.  I  laughed  too. 
Though  he  could  have  lived  quite  comfortably 
on  what  I  gave  him,  and  though  he  had,  as  we  have 
seen,  a  weekly  allowance  which  should  at  least  have 
kept  him  from  starvation,  there  can  be  no  doubt 
that  towards  the  end  of  his  life  Wilde  underwent  a 
certain  amount  of  privation.  He  resorted  to  all 
sorts  of  desperate  shifts  to  get  money,  and  com- 
posed many  very  plausible  begging  letters;  but,  just 
as  pretty  well  every  decent  door  was  shut  to  him, 
so  people  had  begun  to  steel  their  hearts  against 
him,  especially  as  he  was  now  drinking  in  a  most 
reckless  way  and  made  no  secret  of  the  fact  that 
he  had  once  more  given  himself  over  to  his  old 
habits.  He  became  a  sort  of  show  for  the  bohemi- 
ans  of  Paris ;  the  sport  and  mock  of  the  Boulevard 
and  the  reproach  of  English  letters  in  the  City  of 
Light.  He  got  his  dinners  on  credit,  and  borrowed 
money  from  waiters.  His  health  was  on  the  down 
grade  in  consequence  of  the  intensification  by  alco- 
hol of  a  terrible  disease  he  had  contracted.  He  took 
to  weeping  and  cursing  at  the  slightest  provocation, 
and,  though  his  wit  would  flame  out  and  his  learn- 


Naples  and  Paris  135 

ing  remained  with  him  to  the  last,  it  was  a  poor 
wreck  and  shadow  of  himself  which  I  saw  from 
time  to  time  when  I  went  to  Paris  on  various  occa- 
sions in  the  year  1900.  All  through  my  acquaint- 
ance with  him  after  his  release  from  prison  it  had 
required  a  good  deal  of  pluck  to  be  seen  about  with 
him.  He  was  known  and  notorious  wherever  we 
went,  and  I  have  seen  men  leave  cafes  because  he 
had  entered,  and  heard  lulls  in  conversation  and  un- 
pleasant gibes  when  we  have  visited  restaurants 
together.  At  some  of  the  places  which  we  fre- 
quented they  would  have  turned  him  out  had  it  not 
been  for  the  fact  that  apparently  they  could  not 
afford  to  turn  me  out.  In  his  later  period  the  feel- 
ing against  him  grew  more  and  more  pronounced. 
His  companionships  and  resorts  were  of  the  vilest 
and  his  self-respect  was  almost  entirely  gone. 

Of  Wilde's  life  in  Paris  before  he  began  to  break 
up,  the  following  is  a  good  sample  daily  itinerary : 
He  would  rise  late,  say  at  half-past  eleven  or  twelve 
o'clock,  and  walk  from  his  hotel  in  the  Latin  Quar- 
ter, through  the  Louvre  to  the  Cafe  de  la  Paix, 
where  he  would  sit  and  drink  aperitifs  before  going 
to  lunch.  In  the  afternoon  he  would  go  on  to  the 
Grand  Cafe,  where  he  would  drink  till  dinner-time. 
The  evening  he  generally  spent  where  his  friends 
might  lead  him,  and  some  of  them  led  him  to  pretty 


136         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

dreadful  places.  When  I  came  to  Paris  from  Chan- 
tilly,  if  I  had  not  made  an  appointment  with  him 
beforehand  I  could  always  find  him  at  the  Grand 
Cafe  or  the  Cafe  de  la  Paix  of  a  morning,  or  at 
the  Cafe  Jidien  or  the  Calisaya  Bar  of  an  afternoon. 
So  long  as  I  remained  in  Paris  he  lunched  and  dined 
with  me  as  a  matter  of  course — Paillard's,  Maire's, 
and  the  Cafe  de  la  Paix  being  our  chief  resorts.  At 
his  meals  he  behaved  always  like  a  pleased  child, 
provided,  that  is  to  say,  you  had  put  him  into  a 
decent  humour  with  a  present  of  money  before- 
hand. He  was  the  biggest  eater  I  ever  knew,  and 
the  only  man  I  ever  met  in  my  life  who  could  drink 
quantities  of  champagne  at  each  meal  and  keep  on 
doing  it.  He  had  a  fine  head  for  drink,  and  it  was 
not  until  eighteen  months  or  so  before  his  death 
that  he  began  to  lose  it.  Intoxication  would  come 
over  him  suddenly  and  without  apparent  warning. 
He  would  rise  from  his  seat  and  say:  ''My  dear 
fellow,  I  am  sorry,  but  I  perceive  that  I  am  drunk.'' 
Then  he  would  call  loudly  for  a  cab  and  stumble 
forth.  He  made  a  great  joke  about  these  drunken 
fits,  and  one  day  said  to  me: /'I  have  made  a  won- 
derful discovery:  I  find  that  alcohol  taken  per- 
sistently and  in  sufficiently  large  quantities  pro- 
duces all  the  efifects  of  intoxication,"  and  so  it 
certainly  did.     At  Maire*s  there  was  a  real  1800 


Naples  and  Paris  137 

brandy,  which  had  originally  been  laid  down  at  the 
Tuileries.  Wilde  had  some  of  it  after  a  dinner 
there,  and  immediately  began  to  make  Maire's  his 
home.  The  stuff  cost  five  or  six  francs  a  glass,  but 
this  was  nothing  to  Wilde  if  he  happened  to  have 
money  or  was  the  guest  of  somebody  else.  He 
used  to  compliment  the  maitre  d'hotel  on  this  "ex- 
cellent brandy,''  and  there  was  no  getting  him  away 
from  it.  Wilde  had  few  friends  other  than  myself 
who  could  be  of  use  to  him  financially.  Frank 
Harris  used  to  come  over  occasionally  and  take  him 
to  dine  at  Durmid's,  and  I  know  that  Harris  also 
obliged  him  with  money.  From  time  to  time,  too, 
he  picked  up  odd  acquaintances  who  had  means  and 
were  disposed  to  show  him  kindness;  but  for  the 
most  part  they  were  Americans,  and  their  capacity 
for  befriending  the  man  whom  one  of  them  de- 
scribed as  ''England's  premier  poet-dramatist"  ex- 
hibited a  great  want  of  staying  power. 

I  was  in  Scotland  shooting  when  I  had  a  letter 
from  Ross  to  say  that  Wilde  was  ill  but  that  it  was 
nothing  serious.  On  the  next  day  I  got  a  telegram 
announcing  that  he  was  dead  and  asking  what 
should  be  done  in  regard  to  his  affairs.  I  went 
straight  to  Paris  and  to  the  Hotel  d' Alsace,  where 
Wilde  lay  dead.  I  there  saw  Ross  and  Turner. 
They  told  me  that  Wilde  had  no  money.    I  promptly 


138         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

provided  funds  for  the  expenses  of  the  moment 
and  I  paid  for  the  funeral,  at  which  Ross,  Turner 
and  myself  were  the  only  English  mourners.  After 
the  funeral  Ross  handed  me  a  list  of  small  debts 
of  Wilde's,  consisting  of  unpaid  dinner-bills  and 
sums  he  had  borrowed  from  waiters  and  such-like, 
the  amount  being  between  twenty  and  thirty  pounds. 
These  obligations  I  paid. 

When  Wilde  had  been  dead  three  years  I  re- 
ceived from  a  M.  Du  Bouche,  dentist  of  Paris,  a  letter 
in  which  he  pointed  out  that  Wilde  had  owed  him 
six  hundred  francs  for  professional  services,  and 
that  the  account  had  never  been  paid.  I  wrote  to 
M.  Du  Bouche,  advising  him  to  apply  to  Mr.  Adrian 
Hope,  who,  I  understood,  was  Wilde's  trustee. 
Later  Du  Bouche  wrote  to  tell  me  that  he  had  ap- 
plied to  Mr.  Adrian  Hope,  but  that  Mr.  Hope  pro- 
fessed to  know  nothing  of  Wilde's  affairs  or  to  be 
in  any  way  responsible.  In  the  face  of  this  letter 
I  paid  M.  Du  Bouche  six  hundred  francs  in  settle- 
ment of  the  account  and  got  his  receipt  for  it.  There 
was  no  question  at  that  time  of  Ross  being  Wilde's 
legal  representative.  Wilde  made  no  will,  but  over 
and  over  again  before  he  died  he  said  to  me:  ''Of 
course,  if  I  die  first,  you  will  look  after  my  literary 
affairs."  Ross  was  made  literary  executor  of 
Wilde's  estate  in   1906 — six  years  after  Wilde's 


HdTEL    D' ALSACE,     PARIS 


Naples  and  Paris  139 

death.  After  the  funeral  he  came  to  me  and  said : 
''Wilde  has  left  nothing  but  a  tumble  of  old  papers. 
I  suppose  yoii  don't  mind  if  I  go  through  them?'' 
I  told  him  to  do  what  he  thought  best,  and  there  the 
matter  ended.  Ross  was  a  person  whom  Wilde  and 
I  found  useful  because  he  was  always  willing  to 
attend  to  occasional  matters  of  business  for  us 
which  we  were  too  indolent  to  attend  to  ourselves, 
and  this  was  the  light  in  which  I  regarded  him  when 
I  acquiesced  in  the  suggestion  which  he  then  made. 
One  would  think  from  the  continual  references  to 
Wilde's  allowance  being  paid  to  him  ''through  Mr. 
Ross"  that  Wilde  was  in  some  way  in  a  condition 
of  tutelage  to  Ross.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  Wilde 
arranged  for  the  payment  through  Ross  simply  to 
save  himself  the  trouble  and  annoyance  of  corre- 
sponding with  his  wife's  solicitors. 


CHAPTER  X 

THE  '^BALLAD  OF   READING  GAOL" 

IF  Wilde  is  to  last  as  a  poet  it  will  be  on  the 
strength  of  the  ''Ballad  of  Reading  Gaol/' 
The  "Sphinx"  may  also  endure,  though  its 
chances — for  reasons  which  I  shall  explain  in  the 
chapter  on  Wilde's  poetry,  are  not  comparable  with 
those  of  the  "Ballad/'  Criticism  of  the  work  itself 
is  not  entirely  my  present  purpose.  It  is  a  work 
which  stands  out  head  and  shoulders  above  any 
other  of  Wilde's  performances  by  virtue  of  its 
human  appeal  and  its  relative  freedom  from  defects 
which  render  the  bulk  of  Wilde's  poetry  practically 
unreadable.  It  is  singular,  too,  as  being  the  only 
work  of  importance  which  Wilde  completed  after 
his  imprisonment.  There  is  a  story,  and  I  believe  a 
true  one,  to  the  effect  that  before  Wilde  left  prison 
a  certain  American  journalist  offered  him  a  thou- 
sand pounds  for  a  two  hours'  interview  on  the  sub- 
ject of  his  prison  experience.  The  offer  is  said  to 
have  been  communicated  to  Wilde,  and  Wilde  is 
understood  to  have  replied,  with  some  hauteur,  that 

140 


The  ^^Ballad  of  Reading  Gaol"    141 

he  was  astonished  that  such  a  proposal  "should  be 
placed  before  a  gentleman/'  This  was  very  fine 
talk,  and  it  has  been  widely  applauded  by  Wilde's 
admirers.  I  happen  to  know,  however,  that  within 
three  months  of  his  release  Wilde  regretted  bitterly 
that  he  had  not  closed  with  the  American  gentle- 
man's proposition.  At  the  time  the  offer  was  made 
Wilde  knew  that  he  had  eight  hundred  pounds  be- 
hind him,  and  he  had  been  given  to  understand  that 
large  sums  of  money  would  be  subscribed  for  him 
by  his  troop  of  admiring  friends  outside.  The  eight 
hundred  pounds  were  there,  right  enough,  but  the 
mammoth  subscription,  or  whip  round,  resulted  in 
the  collection  of  little  more  than  a  hundred  pounds, 
the  major  portion  of  which  was  contributed  by 
Frank  Harris. 

Wilde  believed,  also,  that  on  his  release  he  would 
find  plenty  of  editors  and  publishers  waiting  for 
him,  with  hope  in  their  eyes  and  fat  cheques  in  their 
hands,  and  that  he  would  be  able  to  pick  and  choose 
among  them  in  the  matter  of  placing  anything  he 
might  choose  to  say  or  write.  Here  again,  how- 
ever, he  was  mistaken;  nobody  deemed  it  worth 
while  to  make  a  bid  for  a  Wilde  book  or  a  Wilde 
play,  and  he  went  to  France  commissionless. 

As  the  beautiful  Berneval  weeks  slipped  away 
with  the  beautiful  Berneval  money,  he  began  to 


142         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

have  twinges  of  anxiety.  He  knew  his  world  well 
and  he  knew  that  his  world  could  do  nothing  for 
him.  He  had  discovered,  likewise,  to  his  amaze- 
ment, that  Oscar  Wilde,  even  with  two  years'  hard 
labour  to  his  credit,  was  not  in  any  large  sense 
marketable  whether  from  a  journalistic  or  a  liter- 
ary point  of  view.  It  was  the  general  feeling  of 
being  ''out  of  it"  which  spurred  him  on  to  build  up 
the  "Ballad  of  Reading  Gaol."  I  know  for  a  fact 
that  he  made  offers  to  be  interviewed  for  much  less 
than  a  thousand  pounds  to  the  editors  of  various 
newspapers  in  England  and  America,  but  no  one 
came  near  him.  All  he  could  manage  to  do  for  him- 
self was  to  get  certain  letters  printed  in  the  Daily 
Chronicle,  and  for  these,  of  course,  he  received 
nothing  in  the  way  of  remuneration;  so  that  the 
"Ballad  of  Reading  Gaol"  became  important  to  him 
in  a  double  sense. 

He  had  taken  the  line  that  he  was  still  an  artist 
and  too  securely  placed  in  his  art  to  condescend 
to  "low  interviewing."  He  also  felt  that  his  one 
chance  of  getting  back  into  something  approximat- 
ing to  public  favour  was  to  produce  some  sort  of 
a  work  of  sustained  and  supreme  power.  This  is 
why  the  "Ballad  of  Reading  Gaol"  is  so  long  and 
so  good.  Wilde  put  all  he  knew  and  all  he  could 
into  it.    He  even  went  to  what  was  for  him  the  fear- 


The  ^'Ballad  of  Reading  Gaol"    143 

ful  and  unthinkable  length  of  truckling  somewhat 
to  the  more  ordinary  human  sentiments  in  the  tone 
of  the  poem,  and  avoided,  as  far  as  he  could,  those 
idiosyncrasies  of  Wilde  the  verse-maker  which  had 
always  provoked  the  expostulation  of  the  critics 
and  the  contempt  or  laughter  of  the  general  public. 
As  we  have  seen,  the  ''Ballad  of  Reading  Gaol"  was 
completed  at  Naples.  I  believe  that  Wilde  was 
satisfied  with  every  word  of  it.  He  had  written  to 
certain  of  his  friends  in  England  pooh-poohing  it 
and  pretending  that  it  was  in  the  manner  of  Sims ; 
but  he  knew  perfectly  well  that  fifty  Sims  rolled  into 
one  would  not  have  produced  such  a  poem,  and  his 
self-deprecations  were  intended  to  soften  his  aban- 
donment of  the  superior  point  of  view  rather  than 
to  express  what  he  really  felt.  Having  finished  the 
poem,  the  next  thing  was  to  sell  it.  His  thoughts 
turned  to  America,  the  land  of  hope  and  glory,  and 
the  land  which  had  evolved  that  never-to-be-for- 
gotten live  journalist  with  his  thousand  pounds  for 
an  interview.  Wilde  solemnly  forwarded  the  "Bal- 
lad of  Reading  GaoF'  to  a  New  York  paper,  the 
name  of  which  wild  horses  shall  not  drag  out  of 
me,  and  proffered  it  for  dollars,  and  the  New  York 
paper  proceeded  solemnly  to  erect  an  everlasting 
monument  to  its  own  stupidity  by  promptly  return- 
ing the  MS.    So  that  for  the  two  or  three  months 


144         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

the  ''Ballad  of  Reading  Gaol''  was  kicking  about 
in  the  world,  with  nobody  to  publish  it.  In  the 
meantime  Wilde  had  gone  to  Paris,  and  he  was 
there  sought  out  by  the  late  Leonard  Smithers,  a 
publisher  who  had  done  a  great  deal  for  Beardsley, 
Dowson,  and  a  number  of  quaint  "geniuses"  whose 
names  are  now  forgotten,  and  who  had  also  pub- 
lished an  unexpurgated  edition  of  "Burton's  Ara- 
bian Nights."  Smithers  took  Wilde  out  to  dinner, 
produced  an  immediate  handful  of  louis,  and  told 
him  that  he  was  prepared  to  publish  anything  that 
he  cared  to  write.  The  "Ballad  of  Reading  Gaol" 
was  raked  out  of  a  drawer  and  handed  to  Smithers, 
and  Smithers  published  it  in  England  in  February, 
1898.  The  first  edition  consisted  of  eight  hundred 
copies  at  two-and-sixpence,  with  thirty  copies  on 
Japanese  vellum.  Six  further  editions  were  called 
for  in  twelve  or  fourteen  months,  and  Smithers  sent 
from  time  to  time  various  useful  cheques  for  royal- 
ties. I  believe  that  he  also  purchased  the  book 
rights  of  Wilde's  plays,  but  that  was  the  end  of  his 
great  publishing  schemes  for  Oscar  Wilde,  for 
Wilde  produced  nothing  out  of  which  a  book  could 
be  made  after  the  "Ballad."  I  may  note  that  two 
or  three  years  after  Wilde's  death  Smithers,  who 
by  this  time  had  fallen  upon  somewhat  evil  days, 
called  on  me  and  told  me  that  he  had  drawings  and. 


The  "Ballad  of  Reading  Gaol"    145 

if  I  remember  rightly,  plates  for  producing  the 
'^Harlot's  House"  in  a  very  sumptuous  and  dec- 
orative form.  The  drawings  were  by  Miss  Althea 
Giles,  and  seemed  to  me  to  be  very  fine.  With  a 
view  of  giving  both  Miss  Giles  and  Smithers  a  lift, 
I  and  a  friend  of  mine  put  up  the  money  Smithers 
required  to  go  on  with  the  publication.  The  ''Har- 
lot's House"  had  never  been  published  in  a  book, 
though  it  had  appeared  in  some  obscure  periodical. 
It  did  not  occur  to  me  that  there  could  be  any 
objection  to  Smithers  publishing  the  book,  which 
is  a  trifle  in  itself,  and  no  more  than  thirty-six  lines 
long.  However,  the  next  I  heard  about  it  was  that 
Ross  had  stepped  in,  in  his  capacity  of  'literary 
executor,"  and  stopped  the  publication.  Ross  did 
this  without  so  much  as  referring  to  me  in  the 
matter,  though,  as  far  as  I  knew,  we  were  on  terms 
of  friendship  at  the  time.  I  suppose  this  is  an  in- 
stance of  what  Mr.  Sherard  calls  "keeping  a  level 
commercial  head  in  looking  after  Wilde's  estate!" 


CHAPTER  XI 

THE   TRUTH    ABOUT    "dE    PROFUNDIS" 

IN  1905  there  was  given  to  the  world  with  a 
great  flourish  of  trumpets  a  book  entitled  "De 
Profundis,"  which  purported  to  be  a  work  by 
Oscar  Wilde.  To  this  book  Robert  Ross  supplied 
the  preface.  It  will  be  necessary  for  us  to  examine 
this  preface  very  thoroughly.  Ross  commences  by 
explaining  that  for  a  long  time  curiosity  had  been 
expressed  about  the  manuscript  of  "De  Profundis/' 
"which  was  known  to  be  in  my  possession,  the 
author  having  mentioned  the  existence  to  many 
other  friends." 

Presuming  that  Wilde  mentioned  the  existence 
of  this  MS.  to  any  of  his  other  friends,  I  very  much 
doubt  whether  he  ever  explained  to  them  the  nature 
of  its  contents.  He  no  more  dared  do  this  than 
he  dared  have  attempted  to  publish  it,  for  he  knew 
perfectly  well  that  if  he  had  told  many  other  friends, 
whispers  of  his  vileness  and  duplicity  would  have 
been  sure  to  get  round  to  me,  and  there  might  have 
been  an  end  of  my  friendship  and  an  end  of  my 
gifts. 

146 


About  ''De  Profundis"  147 

At  our  first  meeting  after  his  release  Wilde  told 
me  that  he  had  ''a  hideous  confession  to  make/' 
He  said  that  while  he  was  in  prison  he  had  been 
told  that  I  was  no  longer  loyal  to  him  and  that 
I  had  expressed  contempt  for  his  sufiferings.  He 
said  that  he  knew  now  that  this  was  not  true,  but 
that  it  had  preyed  on  his  mind,  and  he  had  allowed 
it  to  anger  him  to  such  an  extent  that  he  had  writ- 
ten me  a  very  fierce  and  abominable  letter  and  had 
it  forwarded  by  Ross.  I  told  him  that  I  had  a 
recollection  of  having  received  a  copy  of  some  such 
letter  (not  the  letter  itself)  from  Ross  and  with  it 
a  covering  letter  from  Ross  in  which  he  said  how 
sorry  he  was  to  have  to  send  Wilde's  letter,  but  that 
Wilde  was  apparently  more  or  less  out  of  his  mind 
in  consequence  of  the  treatment  he  had  received  in 
prison,  and  was  disposed  to  quarrel  with  every- 
body, and  that  he  (Ross)  hoped  that  I  should  take 
no  notice  of  what  he  was  sending.  I  threw  the  copy 
of  Wilde's  letter  into  the  fire  and  I  wrote  to  Ross 
to  tell  him  to  mind  his  own  business,  and  to  point 
out  that  if  Wilde  had  anything  to  say  to  me  he 
could  say  it  in  his  own  handwriting.  So  that  when 
Wilde  opened  up  his  "hideous  confession"  I  nat- 
urally thought  that  he  was  referring  to  the  letter 
Ross  had  sent  me,  and  I  said:  ''My  dear  Oscar,  I 
never  read  more  than  three  or  four  lines  of  the 


148        Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

wretched  thing.  I  gathered  that  it  was  an  ill- 
tempered  letter  and  threw  it  into  the  fire.  Don^t 
let  us  talk  any  more  about  it.  I  quite  understand 
how  you  must  have  felt,  but  it  is  all  over  now  and 
there  is  nothing  more  to  be  said."  It  struck  me,  at 
the  moment,  as  curious  that  Wilde  should  be  want- 
ing to  make  confessions  as  to  having  written  a 
letter  which  he  knew  I  had  received,  but  I  had  no 
wish  to  pursue  unpleasant  matters,  and  the  con- 
versation dropped.  From  that  day  forward,  though 
he  was  continually  in  my  company  and  continually 
accepting  kindnesses  at  my  hand,  he  never  breathed 
a  single  word  about  unpleasant  letters  or  secret 
manuscripts  or  anything  of  the  kind.  It  has  been 
suggested  by  people  who  wish  to  make  out  that  I 
had  a  copy  of  "De  Profundis''  sent  to  me  in  Wilde's 
lifetime  that  the  letter  which  I  received  through 
Ross  and  burned  was,  in  fact,  ''De  Profundis,"  but 
this  cannot  be  so,  for  the  very  simple  reason  that 
"De  Profundis"  is  a  fifty-thousand-word  manu- 
script, whereas  the  letter  I  burned  covered  only  sev- 
eral sides  of  ordinary  letter  paper  in  Ross's  hand- 
writing. I  fail  to  see  how  Wilde's  position  is  in 
the  least  degree  improved  even  if  it  were  granted 
that  I  had  received  a  copy  of  the  "De  Profundis" 
manuscript;  but,  as  a  fact,  I  did  not  receive  it. 
Ross  goes  on  to  tell  us  that  Wilde  had  instructed 


About  '*De  Profundis''  149 

him  to  publish  ''De  Profundis/'  Those  instruc- 
tions, Mr.  Ross  tells  us,  were  contained  in  a  letter 
from  Wilde  written  to  him,  obviously  from  prison. 
Part  of  this  letter  Mr.  Ross  has  published  in  ''De 
Profundis,''  but  he  omitted  the  passages  which  gave 
him  the  actual  instructions.  I  should  have  much 
liked  to  have  seen  these,  for  they  might  have  thrown 
some  light  on  Wilde's  action  in  leaving  behind  him 
in  the  hands  of  others  a  posthumous  libel  on  a  man 
who  had  been  his  friend  up  to  and  during  his  prison 
period,  and  to  whom  he  afterwards  turned  for 
assistance  and  refuge. 

It  was  not  till  ''De  Profundis"  was  announced 
to  be  forthcoming  by  the  press  that  I  ever  knew 
that  Wilde  had  left  behind  him  an  unpublished 
manuscript  of  any  sort  or  kind.  When  I  learnt 
that  there  was  a  manuscript  and  that  it  was  to 
be  published  under  the  editorship  of  Ross  I  was 
very  much  astonished.  Wilde  had  never  spoken 
to  me  of  any  manuscript  which  would  be  long 
enough  to  make  a  book;  neither  had  Ross,  and 
neither  had  anybody  else.  I  was  so  astonished 
that  I  went  round  to  see  Ross,  who  at  that  time 
kept  a  picture  shop  in  Ryder  Street.  I  said  to 
him :  "What  is  all  this  about  an  unpublished  manu- 
script by  Wilde?  There  is  no  such  manuscript/' 
He  said:  ''Oh,  yes,  there  is."     I  said:  'Then  why 


150         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

have  you  not  told  me  of  it  before?  and  why  did 
Wilde  not  tell  me  of  it?''  Ross  said:  '1  wanted 
to  keep  it  as  a  surprise."  This  struck  me  as  being 
rather  strange,  and  I  said :  ''Wilde  was  hard  up  and 
keen  on  selling  anything  that  he  could  get  rid  of. 
Why  should  he  not  have  published  it  himself?" 
Ro^s  replied:  "He  didn't  do  that  because  the  MS. 
consists  of  a  long  letter.  It  contains  a  lot  of  dis- 
agreeable writing  about  you  and  other  people,  but  I 
have  cut  this  out,  and  what  is  left  makes  a  nice  little 
book."  I  said  that  it  seemed  a  very  extraordinary 
thing  that  nobody  should  have  heard  of  this  before, 
but  Ross  assured  me  that  he  would  publish  nothing 
that  would  hurt  Wilde's  reputation  and  that  the 
book  would  do  him  good,  and  there  the  matter 
ended.  When  "De  Profundis"  was  published  there 
was  not  a  word  to  indicate  that  it  had  been  ad- 
dressed to  me  and  not  to  Ross  at  all,  and  the  oppo- 
site deduction  is  one  which  the  reader  of  the  preface 
may  fairly  draw.  For  example,  Ross  quotes  Wilde 
as  saying  that  the  privilege  of  writing  to  Ross  at 
great  length  was  one  for  which  he  was  grateful  to 
the  Governor  of  the  prison.  Moreover,  this  im- 
pression still  remains.  Holbrooke  Jackson,  in  his 
book  "The  Eighteen-Nineties"  (published  1913), 
writes  of  Wilde:  "During  his  imprisonment  he 
wrote  'De  Profundis'  in  the  form  of  a  long  letter 


About  ''De  Profundis"  151 

to  his  friend  Robert  Ross."  ''De  Profundis''  was 
published  in  1895,  and  I  never  knew  till  1912 — 
seventeen  years  later,  when  the  Ransome  case  was 
toward — that  it  was  really  addressed  to  me  and  that 
the  unpublished  parts  were  still  in  existence  and 
amounted  to  more  than  half  of  the  whole  manu- 
script. Still  less  did  I  dream  that  the  unpublished 
moiety — as  any  reader  of  the  reports  of  the  Ran- 
some trial  can  see  for  himself — contained  gross 
libels  on  myself  or  that  the  British  Museum  authori- 
ties had  kindly  consented  to  accept  it  as  a  present 
to  the  nation  without  so  much  as  consulting  any  of 
us.  I  leave  the  facts  as  I  have  set  them  forth  to  the 
judgment  of  the  public. 

The  existence  of  the  ''De  Profundis"  manuscript 
forces  us  to  one  of  two  alternatives :  Wilde,  accord- 
ing to  Ross,  wished  it  to  be  published  and  gave  it 
to  Ross  with  a  view  to  publication,  never  afterwards 
changing  his  mind  on  the  subject  or  desiring  that 
the  manuscript  should  be  destroyed.  In  that  case 
he  has  exhibited  a  perfidy  which  is  without  parallel 
in  history,  inasmuch  as  for  three  years  after,  leav- 
ing prison  and  right  up  till  the  time  of  his  death 
he  professed  to  be  my  devoted  and  attached  friend 
and  accepted  in  friendship  what  I  was  very  pleased 
to  give  in  friendship. 

The  other  alternative  is  that,  on  leaving  prison 


152         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

and  finding  that  he  had  been  misinformed  as  to  my 
attitude  toward  him,  he  repented  the  writing  of 
this  manuscript  and  intended  it  to  be  destroyed,  but 
failed  to  cancel  his  instructions. 

While  the  Ransome  case  was  pending  I  wrote 
Ross  a  letter  setting  out  the  facts  stated  above, 
namely,  that  I  had  never  any  idea  that  "De  Pro- 
fundis''  was  a  letter  addressed  to  me  or  that  it  had 
any  connection  with  the  letter  which  Ross  had  sent 
me  in  1897.  I  also  informed  him  of  Wilde's  soli- 
tary reference  to  the  letter,  which  I  have  previously 
referred  to.  I  expected  Ross  to  give  me  some  reply 
by  way  of  explanation,  but  received  none.  I  con- 
sider that,  in  view  of  the  circumstances,  he  might 
have  taken  the  opportunity  of  ridding  the  memory 
of  his  friend  of  what,  in  the  absence  of  such  an 
explanation,  must  be  regarded  by  all  fair-minded 
persons  as  an  act  of  cowardly  and  abominable 
treachery.  As  it  is,  seeing  how  zealous  an  adherent 
of  Wilde  Ross  is,  I  am  forced  to  the  conclusion  that 
Wilde  was  playing  the  Judas  with  me  all  the  time 
we  were  together  at  Naples  and  all  the  time  that  he 
was  lunching  and  dining  and  "meeting  his  diffi- 
culties" at  my  expense  in  Paris. 

Before  proceeding  to  refute  charges  brought 
against  me  at  the  Ransome  trial,  based  on  Wilde's 
posthumous  libel,  I  should  like  to  enquire  whether 


About  "De  Profundis"  153 

it  can  be  considered  proper,  either  on  literary 
grounds  or  on  grounds  of  public  policy,  that  a  book 
like  ''De  Profundis"  should  be  given  to  the  world 
at  all.  Mr.  Ransome  tells  us  that  the  book  is  com- 
posed of  passages  from  a  long  letter  the  complete 
publication  of  which  would  be  impossible  in  this 
generation.  "The  passages  were  selected  and  put 
together,''  he  adds,  ''by  Mr.  Robert  Ross,  with  a 
skill  that  it  is  impossible  sufficiently  to  admire.'' 
Quite  so.  But  it  can  be  demonstrated  out  of  the 
text  that  Mr.  Ross's  selectings  and  puttings- 
together  have,  in  the  net  result,  entirely  deceived 
the  public,  not  only  with  regard  to  the  nature  and 
intentions  of  "De  Profundis"  as  a  book,  but  also 
with  regard  to  Wilde's  own  character  and  his  atti- 
tude towards  his  own  misfortune.  What  right  has 
Mr.  Ross  or  any  other  person,  no  matter  how  skilled, 
to  indulge  in  this  kind  of  literary  liberty?  Despite 
what  Wilde  himself  said  to  the  contrary,  it  is  always 
important  that  we  should  know  as  much  as  is  pos- 
sible to  be  known  about  any  man  who  sets  up  to 
teach  us,  and  especially  is  this  so  in  the  case  of  an 
author  like  Wilde,  whose  whole  writings  amount 
really  to  a  sort  of  personal  statement.  Mr.  Ross 
recognises  this  much,  because  in  his  version  of  "De 
Profundis"  he  offers  no  samples  of  Wilde  the 
vituperative  spitter-out  of  venom  or  of  Wilde  the 


154         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

braggart  and  vain  boaster,  such  as  appear  in  the 
reports  of  the  Ransome  trial,  but  shows  us  simply 
the  Wilde  who  weeps  profusely  and  swears  that  he 
has  turned  saint.  ''And  I  do  this,''  says  Ross,  in 
his  preface,  "hoping  that  my  efforts  will  give  many 
readers  a  different  impression  of  the  witty  and  de- 
lightful writer."  The  ''different  impression"  has 
obviously  resulted.  Wilde  emerges  from  the  mire 
a  gracious,  suffering,  forgiving,  magnanimous  fig- 
ure. The  extracts  from  Wilde's  own  manuscript, 
read  and  relied  on  by  the  counsel  for  the  defendant 
in  the  Ransome  trial,  prove  him  to  have  been  noth- 
ing of  the  kind,  and,  for  that  matter,  the  direct 
opposite.  On  literary  grounds  alone  we  are  surely 
entitled  to  protest  against  such  a  dangerous  viola- 
tion of  the  normal  editorial  function.  If  we  are  to 
take  "De  Profundis"  for  an  approved  precedent,  a 
literary  executor  is  justified  in  treating  a  dead 
man's  inedited  manuscripts  in  such  a  way  that  he 
is  made  to  say  only  half  of  what  he  really  did  say, 
and  so  made  to  appear  the  direct  opposite  of  what 
he  really  was.  On  public  grounds  one  is  entitled 
to  protest  even  more  strongly.  We  have,  in  Wilde, 
a  person  of  careless  and  vicious  life,  whose  talents 
were  always  carelessly  and  at  times  viciously  em- 
ployed. Such  a  man  was  almost,  in  the  nature  of 
things,  bound  to  come  to  a  miserable  and  degraded 


About  "De  Profundis"  155 

end.  Wilde  ended  up  in  prison  for  his  offences, 
and  if  he  had  really  repented  and  had  really  written 
"De  Profundis,"  as  published  without  the  sup- 
pressed portion,  and  lived  out  the  rest  of  his  life  in 
a  decent  way,  it  would  have  been  possible  and  proper 
for  us  to  forgive  and  forget  a  great  deal ;  but,  unless 
he  has  maligned  himself  most  madly,  he  never  did 
repent,  and  it  is  certain  that  ''De  Profundis,''  as 
published,  does  not  represent  his  sentiments  or  his 
nature.  The  result  has  been  that  a  false  and 
specious  glamour  has  been  put  upon  the  aim  and 
trend  of  Wilde's  life  and  writings,  and  very  gen- 
erally the  apologia  contained  in  the  bowdlerised  "De 
Profundis"  is  regarded  as  a  sufficient  ''Apologia  pro 
Vita  sua," 

Commenting  on  the  reading  of  the  unpublished 
parts  of  "De  Profundis"  at  the  Ransome  trial,  the 
Outlook  said: 

'Those  who  heard  its  unpublished  portions  .  .  . 
fall  from  the  lips  of  the  learned  junior  counsel  for 
the  defence,  or  even  those  who  had  to  be  content 
with  such  portions  their  newspapers  gave  them,  had 
the  unusual  experience  of  sharing  the  privileges 
reserved  for  posterity.  They  have  added  to  their 
knowledge  of  the  last  prose  work  of  Oscar  Wilde  ; 
indeed,  they  have  gained  their  first  true  knowledge 
of  the  form  in  which  it  left  his  pen.     They  know 


156         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

that  it  begins  'Dear  Bosie,'  and  ends  'Your  affec- 
tionate friend,  Oscar  Wilde/  but  it  is  not  always 
either  friendly  or  affectionate.  They  know  that 
there  are  parts — about  meals  and  the  influenza  and 
the  respect  that  is  due  to  a  great  artist — 'and  espe- 
cially such  an  artist  as  I  am' — that  are  not  an  ex- 
pression of  the  mood  which  gave  to  the  world  the 
well-known  parts  about  Christ.  They  have  learned, 
for  the  first  time,  that  some  parts  have  been  taken 
and  that  other  parts  have  been  left — to  the  nation. 
In  the  parts  that  have  been  taken,  and  strung,  like 
beads,  on  a  new  string,  to  form  the  book  the  world 
knows,  they  have  learned  that  the  'you'  addressed 
is  not  general  and  impersonal,  but  the  friend  who, 
whatever  the  rights  and  wrongs  of  last  week,  has 
at  least  written  poetry  that  is  better  than  Wilde's 
own,  in  spite  of  the  mood  of  scolding  superiority  in 
which  the  letter  seems  to  have  begun." 

It  has  been  suggested  that  the  article  from  which 
this  passage  is  an  extract  was  written  by  my  friend 
T.  W.  H.  Crosland  and  inserted  in  The  Outlook 
through  the  influence  of  George  Wyndham.  Any- 
body who  is  acquainted  with  London  journalism 
knows  that  Mr.  Crosland  has  had  nothing  to  do 
with  The  Outlook  since  he  resigned  the  Literary 
Editorship  of  that  journal  in  1902;  and  Mr.  Wynd- 
ham ceased  to  have  any  interest  in  the  paper  some 


About  '*De  Profundis"  157 

months  later.  The  author  of  the  article  is,  so  far 
as  I  am  aware,  entirely  unknown  to  me,  and,  in  any 
case,  it  was  not  written  by  my  desire  or  inspiration. 
I  have  already  referred  to  certain  charges  against 
me,  in  support  of  which  passages  from  the  unpub- 
lished parts  of  "De  Profundis''  were  put  to  me  at 
the  Ransome  trial,  and  shown  how  preposterous 
they  are.  I  had  an  opportunity,  at  the  time  of  the 
Ransome  trial,  of  reading  a  copy  of  the  manuscript 
with  great  care ;  and  I  say  advisedly  that,  in  so  far 
as  it  concerns  me,  I  had  great  difficulty  in  finding  a 
single  statement  which  could  not  be  demonstrated 
to  be  utterly,  deliberately  and  ridiculously  false.  If 
Mr.  Robert  Ross  will  remove  his  embargo  I  am 
open  to  print  the  whole  of  such  portions  of  ''De  Pro- 
fundis,''  word  for  word  and  line  for  line,  with  plain 
demonstrations  of  the  absolute  malice  and  contempt 
for  the  truth  that  Wilde  has  exhibited  right  through 
the  piece.  As  it  is,  at  present  I  am  prevented  from 
quoting  or  even  from  paraphrasing  any  portions 
owing  to  the  legal  steps  taken  by  Mr.  Ross.  But,  in 
order  that  it  may  never  be  suggested  that  I  fear  or 
admit  the  charges  brought  against  me  in  the  Ran- 
some trial,  and  to  clear  myself  from  them,  I  propose 
to  deal  with  the  more  serious  of  them  (not  already 
dealt  with  in  Chapter  VIII)  as  assertions  of  fact 
and  not  even  by  way  of  paraphrase  of  the  precious 


158         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

MS.  I  should  have  preferred  to  put  these  charges 
into  Wilde's  own  words,  and  so  have  given  my 
posthumous  libeller  every  opportunity  of  couching 
his  attack  in  his  own  way  and  with  all  the  master's 
skill.  But  Mr.  Ross  has  prevented  this  by  obtain- 
ing an  injunction  against  me.  I  do  not  think,  how- 
ever, that  either  he  or  the  law  can  prevent  me  from 
dealing  with  allegations  of  fact  made  against  me 
in  cross-examination  qua  allegations  of  fact. 

I  have  already  referred  to  the  falseness  of 
Wilde's  charge  that  I  hampered  his  work,  and  that 
when  I  was  by  he  was  sterile.  I  had  to  meet  the 
charge,  in  particular,  that  when  he  was  pressed  to 
deliver  "The  Ideal  Husband"  he  had  to  wait  till 
I  was  away  and  then  got  on  famously.  When  I 
returned,  ''all  work  had  to  be  abandoned."  This 
assertion  is  wantonly  wrong.  When  Wilde  was  in 
working  mood  he  worked  and  I  never  attempted 
to  take  him  away  from  it.  The  play  was  read  to 
me  scene  by  scene  and  line  by  line,  and  so  far  from 
my  having  delayed  its  completion  I  materially 
assisted  it.  If  one  were  disposed  to  be  flippant  and 
to  admit  that  Wilde  gives  a  correct  description  of 
our  daily  programme  at  St.  James'  Place,  one  might 
enquire  why — if  he  found  it  impossible  to  work  in 
the  atmosphere  of  his  own  quiet  and  peaceful  house- 
hold and  found  it  equally  impossible  to  work  at  St. 


About  "De  Profundis"  159 

James'  Place  because  of  my  interruptions — he  never 
locked  the  door  of  St.  James'  Place,  never  contrived 
to  be  out,  and  never  omitted  to  send  me  telegrams 
of  enquiry  and  letters  of  pleasant  rebuke  if  I  hap- 
pened to  miss  calling  upon  him.  Wilde  was  too 
keen  an  artist  to  allow  anything  or  anybody  to  come 
between  him  and  what  he  would  call  a  realisable 
mood.  The  truth  is  that  he  would  begin  a  work 
with  great  zeal  and  fury  and  apply  himself  to  it  and 
to  the  contemporaneous  consumption  of  cigarettes 
and  whiskies  till  he  became  utterly  exhausted.  As 
a  rule,  he  completed  what  he  had  begun  in  a  series 
of  spurts  and  with  periods  of  easy  donothingness 
between  whiles.  On  the  other  hand,  there  were 
occasions  when  he  got  stuck,  and  he  got  stuck  over 
more  than  one  of  his  plays.  This  is  merely  to  say 
that  he  was  like  any  other  artist ;  to  blame  me  for 
it  is  childish  or  lunatic — whichever  you  will.  Wilde 
began  'The  Sphinx'' — a  work  of  which  he  was  in- 
ordinately proud — when  he  was  little  more  than 
twenty  years  of  age :  he  was  thirty-eight  before  he 
finished  it,  and  then,  apparently,  he  had  to  call  in 
no  less  a  poet  than  Robert  Harborough  Sherard, 
author  of  "Whispers,"  to  help  him  out  with  rhymes 
ending  with  "ar."  Sherard  tells  us  with  great  pomp 
and  pride  that  he  suggested  ''nenuphar" — a  sub- 
stantive of  Greek  origin,  which  had  been  worn  to 


160         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

death  by  precious  poets  before  either  Wilde  or 
Sherard  was  born,  but  the  sudden  and  glorious  dis- 
covery of  which  by  Sherard  appears  to  have  trans- 
ported them  both  into  the  seventh  heaven. 

It  is  absolutely  untrue  that  my  mother,  the 
Dowager  Marchioness  of  Queensberry,  ever  in- 
formed Wilde  at  Bracknell  that  I  was  'Vain,"  or 
''wrong  about  money/'  My  mother  has  never  been 
in  the  habit  of  discussing  the  characters  of  those 
near  and  dear  to  her  with  anybody,  much  less  with 
comparative  strangers.  On  his  own  showing, 
Wilde  scarcely  knew  me  at  this  period,  and  on  the 
only  occasion  he  was  at  my  mother's  house  near 
Bracknell  there  were  a  dozen  other  guests  staying 
in  the  house,  and  his  conversations  with  my  mother 
would  be  of  the  very  slightest,  and  amount,  so  far 
as  she  was  concerned,  to  the  merest  civilities  when 
they  met  at  lunch  or  dinner.  My  mother  is  still 
alive  and,  whether  at  Bracknell  or  anywhere  else, 
she  did  not  say  to  Wilde  what  he  professes  she  said. 
It  is  the  same  with  the  charge  that  our  residence 
at  Goring,  where  I  was  well  known,  cost  him  a  fab- 
ulous sum.  If  this  is  so,  seeing  that  we  shared 
expenses  of  the  Goring  establishment,  Wilde  ap- 
pears to  have  let  me  off  exceedingly  cheaply  for 
my  half-share;  for  I  do  not  recollect  that  it  cost  me 
more  than  twenty  or  thirty  pounds  a  month,  exclud- 


RAYMOND  WILFRID  SHOLTO  DOUGLAS,  ONLY  CHILD  OF  LORD 

ALFRED   DOUGLAS,    BORN    17TH  NOVEMBER,    1902 

(AGED  NINE  IN   THE  PHOTOGRAPH) 


About  ''De  Profundis"  161 

ing  the  rent,  of  which  I  never  heard,  inasmuch  as 
Wilde  professed  that  the  house  had  been  lent  to  him 
by  a  well-known  member  of  the  Peerage.  If  thir- 
teen hundred  pounds  were  spent  by  Wilde  at  Goring 
during  those  three  months,  all  I  can  say  is  that  at 
least  twelve  hundred  must  have  gone  in  rent;  for 
we  lived  very  simply  there,  and  there  were  no  res- 
taurants into  which  one  could  be  lured  to  a  meal 
which  would  cost  ''a  whole  sovereign."  So  Goring 
won't  do,  any  more  than  the  five  thousand  pounds 
worth  of  ortolans  and  Perrier  Jouet.  One  other 
small  matter  and  I  shall  have  done  with  this  part 
of  the  subject. 

I  deny  emphatically  that  I  gambled  and  lost  at 
Algiers  and  expected  him  to  pay  my  losses.  At 
the  time  Wilde  and  I  went  to  Algiers  together  I 
had  just  come  into  some  money,  and  I  took  a  suite 
of  rooms  at  the  best  hotel  in  the  place.  Wilde 
stayed  there  with  me,  and  I  paid  the  hotel  bill  my- 
self. There  was  not,  so  far  as  I  am  aware,  a  tripot 
or  other  gambling  place — much  less  a  Casino — in 
Algiers  at  that  period,  so  that  neither  of  us  could 
gamble  even  if  we  had  wished  to.  Wilde  returned 
to  London  before  me  for  business  reasons ;  but  the 
business  was  entirely  his  own  and  had  nothing  to 
do  with  me,  and  I  lent  him  fifteen  pounds  to  pay 
his  fare  home.     By  some  aberration  or  other  he 


162         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

actually  returned  me  this  money,  paying  a  cheque 
for  the  amount  into  my  account  in  London.  In  all 
the  literature  of  the  subject,  that  is  to  say,  in  all  the 
pass-books,  banking  accounts,  business  and  private 
letters,  and  so  forth,  that  are  in  existence  or  ever 
did  exist,  this  is  the  sole  and  only  instance  of  Wilde 
ever  paying  a  sum  of  money  to  me;  whereas  it  could 
be  demonstrated  out  of  the  same  documents  that  I 
paid  a  very  great  many  sums  to  Wilde.  In  the  safe 
seclusion  of  Reading  Gaol  he  sits,  tearfully  peni- 
tent, and  remembers  that  fifteen  pounds,  which,  no 
doubt,  loomed  up  in  his  memory  like  a  shot-tower. 
He  catches  at  it,  gleefully,  and  uses  it  as  a  peg 
on  which  to  hang  a  false,  preposterous,  lying  story 
about  meeting  my  gambling  debts  in  a  place  where 
there  is  no  gambling.  At  the  back  of  his  mind  he 
knew  that  nothing  of  the  kind  ever  occurred,  yet  the 
fifteen  pound  payment  might  have  lent  colour  to 
the  statement  if  it  came  to  be  investigated  after  my 
death.  And  that  was  all  the  colour  he  had  for  his 
pretty  statement. 

I  have  no  wish  to  be  uncharitable  to  this  man 
who,  doubtless,  suffered,  and  suffered  severely. 
Nobody  could  read  the  complete  "De  Profundis" 
without  perceiving  that  imprisonment  destroyed 
Wilde's  moral  fibre  and  crushed  his  spirit  to  such 
an  extent  that  he  became  a  sort  of  Mrs.  Gummidge 


About  "De  Profundis''  163 

who  felt  everything  ''more  than  you  do."  I  am 
forced  to  think — and,  to  be  quite  frank,  I  try  to 
think — that  Wilde  cannot  have  been  mentally  re- 
sponsible when  he  wrote  this  stupid  and  abominable 
manuscript.  That  I  am  not  alone  in  my  opinion 
of  what  confinement  and  bitter  discipline  were  do- 
ing for  him  will  be  evident  from  the  following  letter 
which  I  received  from  a  close  friend  of  Ross's  at 
the  time  when  Wilde  was  supposed  to  be  angry  with 
me.  The  letter  is  dated  from  a  house  which  was  at 
that  time  occupied  by  Ross  and  the  writer  of  the 
letter. 

"My  Dear  Bosie, 

''Your  letter  distresses  me,  for  I  can  say 
so  little  to  comfort  you  and  I  would  do  all  I  can. 
You  will  know  by  this  time  that  I  had  seen  Oscar 
before  I  received  your  letter.  I  saw  him  on  Sat- 
urday, 30th  November,  the  very  day  you  wrote, 
and  I  only  got  your  letter  to-day,  Tuesday.  You 
must  not  think  that  I  do  not  know  what  Oscar's 
change  towards  you  must  be  to  you,  but  Robbie 
will  tell  you  that  from  the  very  first  I  never  be- 
lieved that  it  was  more  than  a  passing  delirium 
of  gaol  moral  fever.  I  naturally  minimised  to  you 
and  Robbie,  when  I  wrote,  the  horrors  of  the  gen- 
eral prison  surroundings,  but  I  have  seen  them, 


164         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

and  am  confirmed  in  my  belief  that  no  man  like 
Oscar  who  is  subject  to  them  can  be  considered 
capable  of  exercising  his  ordinary  mental  or  moral 
faculties.  What  he  says  now  no  more  expresses 
his  proper  natural  feelings  than  do  the  ravings  of 
a  man  in  delirium.  I  am  certain  that  his  mind  has 
very  much  suflfered,  but  I  think  from  what  I  have 
heard  of  him  before,  and  what  I  have  seen  of  him, 
that  he  is  better ;  and  I  think  that  he  is  conscious 
that  he  must  make  efforts  to  prevent  his  mind 
suffering  more,  because  he  was  so  very  anxious  to 
get  some  rather  drudging  mental  work  to  do,  in 
order  to  occupy  and,  in  a  sort  of  way,  discipline 
his  mind.  In  former  interviews  he  spoke  of  you 
just  as  a  lunatic  or  a  man  in  delirium  does  of  the 
people  they  love  best,  but  the  other  day  he  did  not 
do  so;  he  merely  complained  of  some  letter  which 
you  had  written  to  him  or  to  the  Governor  (I  sup- 
pose of  Wandsworth)  which  he  had  heard  of  but 
was  not  allowed  to  see.  I  told  him  that  I  was  cer- 
tain that  you  would  write  no  more.  He  has  to  be 
talked  to  as  a  person  very  slowly  recovering  from 
delirium.  I  could  not  have  said  anything  to  dis- 
tress him.  Just  think,  he  has  only  one  half-hour  in 
the  awful  weeks  of  hideous  prison  life.  You  must 
try  to  show  the  love  which  I  know  you  have  for 
him,  by  the  most  difficult  of  all  ways — waiting," 


About  "De  Profundis"  165 

There  may  be- — and  probably  is — a  good  deal  to 
be  said  for  the  view  herein  set  forward,  and  it 
would  be  inhuman  not  to  make  all  necessary  allow- 
ances. But  we  are  still  left  face  to  face  with  the 
unchallengeable  fact  that  Wilde  was  sane  enough 
when  he  came  out  of  prison;  that  his  health  was 
on  the  whole  improved  by  his  sojourn  there;  and 
that  for  three  years  he  kept  up  his  friendship  with 
me,  and  lived  to  a  great  extent  on  my  bounty ;  and 
that  he  never  said  a  single  word  about  the  disgrace- 
ful document  which  Mr.  Ross  has  so  generously  be- 
stowed upon  the  nation. 


CHAPTER  XII 

MY   LETTERS   TO   WILDE 

THE  law  as  to  property  in  letters  appears 
to  be  in  a  very  confused  and  amazing  con- 
dition. Letters,  though  lightly  penned  by 
most  people  and  considered  to  be  of  trifling  impor- 
tance, are  nearly  always  far  more  important  than 
they  look.  If  I  had  been  cautious  and  worldly- 
wise  I  suppose  that  the  letters  which  I  wrote  to 
Oscar  Wilde  or,  at  any  rate,  those  which  were 
produced  by  favour  of  Ross  at  the  Ransome  trial, 
would  never  have  been  written.  The  fact  that  they 
were  written,  however,  cannot  be  denied,  and,  for 
many  reasons,  I  am  not  sorry  that  they  were 
brought  up  against  me.  I  knew  that  some  such 
letters  existed,  and  I  was  told  before  the  trial  came 
on  that  they  would  be  produced  and  that  they  would 
ruin  me.  Well,  to  the  great  consternation  and 
amazement  of  the  parties  immediately  concerned 
I  went  into  the  witness-box  and  ''faced  the  music," 
and  I  was  not  ruined.  By  a  coincidence,  it  hap- 
pened that  I  had  various  difficulties  of  litigation 

i66 


My  Letters  to  Wilde  167 

round  about  the  time  of  the  Ransome  trial,  and 
rumour  had  it  that  those  troubles  were  in  some  way 
bound  up  with  the  Wilde  affair.  As  a  fact,  they 
had  nothing  to  do  with  it,  and  were  quite  indepen- 
dent of  it,  and  even  the  endeavour  to  create  a  public 
impression  that  my  wife  had  left  me  because  of  the 
Ransome  trial  proved  utterly  futile.  The  unfortu- 
nate differences  between  myself  and  Lady  Alfred 
Douglas  arose  out  of  matters  of  settlements  and 
the  education  of  our  child,  and,  lest  my  enemies 
should  lay  the  flattering  unction  to  their  souls  that 
they  have  succeeded  in  separating  us,  I  may  men- 
tion here  and  now  that  my  wife  and  I  are  no  longer 
at  variance  and  that  our  reconciliation  was  brought 
about  by  our  two  selves  after  the  trial  and  not 
before  it.  In  the  witness-box  I  made  no  bones  about 
condemning  the  two  letters  of  mine  which  were 
raked  up  to  show  that  I  had  a  bad  influence  over 
Wilde's  mind.  I  shall  not  attempt  to  justify  them 
here,  and  I  shall  not  abate  my  opinion  of  them  one 
jot  or  tittle.  They  are  letters  which  I  am  ashamed 
to  have  written  and  which  I  ought  to  have  a  good 
deal  too  much  sense  to  write.  They  have  not  been 
printed  in  the  press  and  I  shall  not  reproduce  them 
here,  any  more  than  I  would  think  of  reproducing 
similar  letters  written  by  Wilde  and  his  friends.  I 
do  not  think,  however,  that  any  man  of  the  world 


168         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

who  perused  them  could  fail  to  recognise  that  they 
were  letters  written  more  or  less  in  a  jocular  spirit, 
and  that  they  were  plainly  not  the  letters  of  the 
kind  of  person  some  people  have  been  gracious 
enough  to  wish  to  make  me  out.  At  school,  the 
universities,  and  even  in  clubs,  men  who  are  not 
considered  by  any  means  wicked  men  make  jokes, 
exchange  jokes,  and  tell  stories  which,  one  takes  it, 
would  very  much  shock  Mr.  Justice  Darling  if  they 
happened  to  come  to  his  polite  ears.  There  are  per- 
sons of  the  highest  positions  in  all  walks  of  life — 
not  even  forgetting  the  immaculate  and  stainless 
profession  of  the  law — who  in  their  day  and  gen- 
eration could  swap  coarse  jokes  with  any  stable-boy, 
and  who,  over  their  wine,  are  not  above  indulging  in 
a  trifle  of  witty  obscenity,  even  yet.  Everybody 
knows  this,  and  nobody  pretends  that  it  is  other- 
wise, or  that  it  is  ever  likely  to  be  otherwise.  The 
only  place  where  you  get  such  a  pretence  is  in  the 
law  courts,  when  Counsel  wishes  to  "eviscerate" 
somebody.  The  pretence  was  well  kept  up  at  the 
Ransome  trial  by  all  parties  concerned  and  as  I 
have  said  before,  I  do  not  in  the  least  complain  but 
am  rather  glad  than  otherwise.  For  the  improper 
is  obviously  the  improper  wherever  you  encounter 
it,  and  there  is  no  reason  why  my  impropriety  should 
be  extenuated  while  the  next  man's  is  punished.    I 


My  Letters  to  Wilde  169 

punished  myself  for  my  offences  against  decency 
and  good  taste  by  standing  up  and  having  them  read 
out  to  me  twenty  years  after  they  were  written.  I 
could  have  run  away  from  them  if  I  had  wished  to, 
but  I  stood  my  ground  and  took  my  gruel  with  a 
short  spoon.  The  result  has  been  exactly  what  one 
was  entitled  to  expect  that  it  would  be.  I  have  not 
lost  a  single  friend  or  come  across  a  single  cold 
shoulder  as  the  result  of  Mr.  Ross's  letter-preserv- 
ing charitableness.  My  cousin,  the  late  Right  Hon- 
ourable George  Wyndham,  m.p.,  than  whom  no 
more  honourably-minded  man  existed,  wrote  to  me 
immediately  after  the  trial  and  told  me  that  he 
had  followed  it  closely,  and  that  nothing  had  hap- 
pened which  was  to  make  any  difference  between 
himself  and  myself,  and  he  added  that,  not  only 
in  his  opinion  but  in  the  opinion  of  many  persons 
with  whom  he  had  talked,  I  had  been  abominably 
treated.  Of  course,  it  is  preposterous  to  say  that 
my  influence  over  Wilde  was  a  bad  influence.  If 
the  letters  produced  to  prove  it  prove  anything  at 
all,  they  prove,  rather,  that  Wilde's  influence  over 
me  was  a  bad  one,  and  a  very  bad  one  at  that.  Any 
one  who  knows  me  must  be  well  aware  that,  when  it 
came  to  the  question  of  his  ultimate  vices,  such  influ- 
ence as  I  had  over  him  was  on  the  side  of  goodness 
and  decency  rather  than  otherwise.    In  all  his  cun- 


170         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

ning,  overweening  and  merciless  desire  to  damage 
and  destroy  me,  Wilde  could  never  find  it  in  his  heart 
to  set  down  the  last  unthinkable  lie.  He  knew  that 
if  he  did  that  he  would  be  blankly  sinning  against 
the  Holy  Ghost,  and,  hate  me  as  he  would,  and  rage 
and  rage  as  he  would,  he  could  not  bring  himself 
to  take  the  terrible  risks.  Nowhere  in  all  this  out- 
pouring of  hate  does  he  dare  to  come  out  with  the 
accusation  which  would  put  me  outside  the  pale 
of  social  possibility.  That  he  was  quite  willing  to 
have  shouted  that  accusation  out  at  the  top  of  his 
voice  if  there  had  been  the  slightest  ground  for  it 
is  only  too  evident  from  the  general  drift  of  what 
he  has  to  say.  If  by  a  deft  ambiguity  he  can  get 
in  the  hint  that  will  hurt  me  without  going  the 
length  of  the  rankest  perjury  he  gets  it  in.  It  is 
plain  on  every  showing  that  our  friendship  was  a 
harmless  and  proper  friendship  and  that  our  life 
together  was  harmlessly,  if,  perhaps,  somewhat  ex- 
travagantly, lived;  and  two  things  have  always  to 
be  remembered:  first,  that  during  our  friendship, 
whether  despite  me  or  otherwise,  Wilde  did  un- 
doubtedly produce  the  best  of  his  plays  and  the  finest 
of  his  poems,  indeed,  the  only  poem  which  is  likely 
to  live;  while,  during  the  same  friendship,  I,  for 
my  part,  produced  the  bulk  of  the  poetry  con- 
tained in  the  "City  of  the  Soul.'*    There  is  nothing 


My  Letters  to  Wilde  171 

in  any  of  the  work  produced  by  Wilde  during  the 
time  that  we  were  together  of  which  he  need  be 
ashamed,  and  there  is  nothing  in  the  "City  of  the 
Soul"  of  which  I  need  be  ashamed.  On  the  con- 
trary, Wilde's  reputation,  in  so  far  as  it  is  a  pure 
literary  reputation,  has  been  largely  built  up  on  the 
work  to  which  I  refer,  whereas  it  is  largely  by  my 
own  work  during  that  period  that  I  shall  stand  or 
fall  so  far  as  posterity  is  concerned.  How  dare 
people  assail  and  defame  an  association  of  this 
kind  ?  I  print  below  two  letters  which  were  sent  to 
me  by  Mr.  George  Wyndham  immediately  after  the 
Ransome  trial. 

I  leave  the  parties  concerned  to  make  the  best 
they  can  of  an  outside  opinion,  and  to  meditate  with 
what  gratification  they  may  on  their  ''base  thing.*' 


Jn^  ^^j^  £^A    /.^  ^^ 
•&^7  q  ^  ^^^^  ^^  ^^  ,^^_ 


^f-* 


ix^  ^l/^    tf^^tCr.    ifuT*  ^V  /-vir* 


^  f^^^<  /.i^  /;    ^ 


^:2-*-.   *^ 


^tc^U,  i/7t^y^     dtp  {/a^cJT 


*-*-A. 


44.  BELORAVe  SQUARE, 


9t  .    /Vr   /2, 


/^^^^^  ^^/:.^-<  '^'^''^^ 


l,j^SL>^^        yUZJ^^        "^^-lA.^*-*-!  y 


CHAPTER  XIII 

MY  LETTERS  TO  LABOUCHERE 

THAT  the  late  Henry  Labouchere  was  a  good 
deal  of  a  blackguard  is  well  known,  but  he 
was  one  of  those  blackguards  who  man- 
aged to  get  into  the  House  of  Commons  and,  as 
impudence  was  a  gift  with  him,  he  made  some  repu- 
tation there.  When  Gladstone  proposed  to  give 
him  a  Cabinet  appointment,  however.  Queen  Vic- 
toria calmly  drew  her  pen  through  his  name.  Glad- 
stone gasped,  but  Labouchere  did  not  become  a 
Minister  of  the  Crown.  Labby's  strength  lay  in 
his  money.  A  poorer  rogue  would  not  have  been 
tolerated,  even  in  the  House  of  Commons.  And 
Labby's  weakness  was  Truth — the  paper,  not  the 
abstraction.  Labouchere  always  made  a  great  point 
of  running  Truth  in  the  interests  of  public  morality. 
For  quack  doctors,  begging-letter  writers,  and  cer- 
tain classes  of  bookmakers  and  money-lenders  he 
had,  invariably,  abundant  stripes;  but  for  the  very 
big  fish  Henry  Labouchere  had  a  confirmed  respect 

179 


180         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

and  was  most  careful  to  say  nothing  about  them 
and  do  nothing  to  them — unless  they  happened  to 
fall,  when  he  would  rush  in  and  deliver  a  few  kicks. 
It  is  not  astonishing  that  as  soon  as  Oscar  Wilde 
came  to  grief  Henry  Labouchere  should  have 
hastened  to  put  in  his  bit  of  kicking.  While  Wilde 
was  flaunting  himself  about  town  and  "going 
strong/'  Labby  found  it  convenient  to  let  him  alone, 
even  though  "there  were  rumours" — and  Truth  was 
nothing  if  not  an  investigator  of  rumours.  In  his 
hey-dey,  therefore,  Labby  would  say  no  word  that 
was  evil  of  Wilde,  though  he  poked  fun  at  him.  But 
the  moment  Mr.  Justice  Wills  hands  out  two  years' 
hard  labour  and  Wilde  is  down  and  past  mortal 
chance  of  getting  up  again,  forth  comes  Labby, 
with  his  silly  little  patent-leather  boots  and  his 
dirty  little  dagger,  and  Wilde  is  kicked  and  stabbed 
without  mercy.  Incidentally,  too,  Labby  took  the 
opportunity  to  refer  to  me  as  a  "young  scoundrel" 
and  to  accuse  me  of  deserting  my  friend  in  his 
trouble.  I  wrote  and  pointed  out  that,  so  far  from 
deserting  Wilde,  I  was  the  one  and  only  friend  of 
his  who  remained  faithful  to  him  after  his  arrest, 
and  visited  him  daily  in  prison,  and  when  he  was  up 
at  Bow  Street  Police  Station ;  and  I  went  on  to  ex- 
press my  opinion  of  the  mean  and  unnecessary 
venom  of  Labby's  attacks  on  a  man  who  was  down 


My  Letters  to  Labouchere        181 

and  unable  to  defend  himself.  It  is  characteristic 
of  Labouchere  that,  while  he  was  too  much  of  a 
coward  to  print  my  letters  in  full,  and  was  content 
to  publish  only  that  part  of  one  of  them  in  which 
I  defended  myself  against  his  charge  of  deserting 
my  friend,  he  was  careful  to  preserve  them. 
Eighteen  years  after  they  were  written  Truth 
turned  up  in  court  with  them  to  be  used  against 
me  in  a  matter  with  which  Truth  was  not  in  any 
way  concerned.  I  presume  that  they  were  produced 
under  subpoena,  though  how  their  existence  became 
known  to  Mr.  Ransome  remains  a  mystery.  With 
that  fine  sense  of  what  is  fitting  which  distinguishes 
him,  Mr.  Justice  Darling  explained  that  the  people 
who  have  kept  and  produced  my  letters  are  not  to  be 
blamed,  "inasmuch,"  said  his  lordship,  "as  they  are 
only  doing  what  they  are  paid  to  do,"  which  is 
somewhat  cryptic,  but  is  possibly  meant  to  be  funny. 
However,  I  really  do  not  care  "tuppence"  who 
treasures  these  letters  of  mine.  The  only  point  is 
that  somehow  it  seems  un-English  and  unsports- 
manlike. As  for  the  letters  themselves,  they  failed 
entirely  in  the  object  to  which  they  were  put  by 
Ransome's  lawyers.  I  cannot  find  that  it  was 
thought  wise  to  print  extracts  from  them  in  the 
newspapers  at  the  time  of  the  trial.  And,  as  I 
have  not  got  possession  of  them  and  am  apparently 


182  Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

not  entitled  to  possession  of  them,  I  cannot  print 
them  here,  even  if  I  were  disposed  to  do  so.  I  know 
what  is  in  them,  however,  and  there  is  no  reason 
why  I  should  not  summarise  them.  The  letters 
contain  the  stock  arguments  of  those  apologists 
for  the  perversion  to  which  Wilde  was  addicted 
which  were  current  at  the  time.  They  point  out 
that  vice  of  this  character  was  rampant  in  the  West 
End  of  London  and  at  certain  public  schools  and 
universities,  and  that  Labby  had  not  said  a  word 
about  it  in  his  wonderful  paper — Truth,  The  letters 
also  quote  or  epitomise  sundry  medical  and  scien- 
tific views  on  the  subject.  That  is  all.  What  I 
had  to  say  I  said  plainly  and  without  beating  about 
the  bush,  and,  while  I  should  not  write  such  letters 
to-day,  there  is  nothing  about  them  which  is  greatly 
to  my  discredit.  During  the  whole  time  of  the  trial 
there  sat  in  court  the  author  of  the  following  state- 
ment :  '^It  is  a  matter  of  common  observation  among 
physiologists  that  where  a  child  is  born  to  a  couple 
in  which  the  woman  has  the  much  stronger  nature 
and  a  great  mental  superiority  over  the  father,  the 
chances  are  that  the  child  will  develop  at  certain 
critical  periods  in  his  career  an  extraordinary  at- 
traction towards  persons  of  its  own  sex.  This  fact 
is  one  of  Nature's  mysteries.  Those  who  believe 
in  a  Divine  Creation  of  the  world  should  reverently 


My  Letters  to  Labouchere       183 

bow  their  heads  before  what  they  cannot  under- 
stand and  ought  to  take  to  be  a  divine  dispensation. 
At  any  rate,  the  wisdom  of  Nature  may  be  pre- 
sumed greater  than  that  of  the  Ecclesiastical 
Courts." 

There  is  nothing  in  my  letters  to  Labouchere 
which  can  in  the  least  compare  with  the  foregoing 
passage,  which  I  take  from  'The  Life  of  Oscar 
Wilde,"  by  Robert  Harborough  Sherard.  Sherard's 
''Life,"  like  Ransome's  "Critical  Study,"  is  pub- 
lished broadcast  and  under  everybody's  nose,  and 
both  of  them,  as  we  have  seen,  contain  their  indi- 
vidual views  of  Wilde's  vices. 


CHAPTER  XIV 

THE   ARTICLE    IN    THE   ''rEVUE   BLANCHE" 

IN  pursuance  of  what  I  conceived  to  be  my  duty 
towards  Wilde  at  the  time  he  was  in  prison, 
I  wrote  the  Labouchere  letters  and  a  good  deal 
of  similar  matter  which  was  not  printed.  My  argu- 
ment was  not  that  Wilde  had  wrongfully  been  con- 
victed, and  not  that  what  he  did  was  to  be  counted 
to  his  credit,  or  even  to  be  approved,  but  merely 
that  there  were  scientific  and  medical  grounds  for 
supposing  that  he  was  not  responsible  for  his 
actions  in  this  regard,  and  that,  in  any  case,  the 
punishment  meted  out  to  him  seemed  unnecessarily 
and  brutally  severe.  I  do  not  know  that  I  have 
changed  my  opinion  to  this  day.  It  is  unthinkable 
that  a  sane  person  could  flounder  into  the  loathsome 
depths  in  which  Wilde  was  taken  red-handed;  par- 
ticularly is  it  unthinkable  in  respect  of  a  man  of 
Wilde's  culture  and  social  surroundings. 

That  he  was  sane  enough  in  other  regards  cannot 
be  doubted,  but  I  do  not  think  there  can  be  any 
question  as  to  his  insanity  on  this  particular  point. 

184 


Article  in  the  "Revue  Blanche''   185 

But  this  is  as  far  as  I  go,  and  this  is  as  far  as  any 
decently-minded  person  can  go.  I  never  went  an 
inch  further,  and  never  intended  to.  I  have  already 
stated  that  after  sentence  was  passed  upon  Wilde 
all  Paris  appeared  to  go  off  its  head  with  regard 
to  the  scandal.  Many  absurd  and  unfounded  pieces 
of  gossip  were  published  in  the  French  newspapers, 
and  some  of  these  I  took  it  upon  myself  to  endeavour 
to  refute.  When  it  became  known  that  I  was  in 
Paris,  the  interviewers  flocked  round  me  and 
wanted  me  to  talk  to  them  on  all  manner  of  silly 
matters.  I  declined  to  have  anything  to  do  with 
them  in  a  general  way,  especially  as  I  found  that 
they  were  disposed  to  garble  and  exaggerate  every- 
thing one  might  tell  them.  One  fine  morning,  how- 
ever, there  called  upon  me  a  journalist  with  whom 
I  had  some  acquaintance,  who  told  me  that  he  had 
been  commissioned  by  the  Editor  of  the  Revue 
Blanche  to  get  me  to  write  an  article  on  the  Wilde 
affair  in  which  my  views  should  be  set  out  definitely 
and  finally,  and  thus  put  an  end  to  the  extraordinary 
stories  which  were  being  circulated  in  my  name.  I 
knew  the  Revue  Blanche  as  a  weekly  literary  jour- 
nal of  somewhat  advanced  opinions,  and  I  thought 
that  here  was  an  excellent  opportunity  to  say  some- 
thing that  might  be  of  use  to  Wilde.  My  difficulty 
was  that,  while  I  spoke  French  fluently,  I  did  not 


186         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

feel  that  I  had  a  sufficient  command  of  style  and 
so  forth  to  write  the  article  in  French.  My  friend 
the  journalist  was  very  accommodating,  however, 
and  it  was  arranged  between  us  that,  with  the 
knowledge  of  the  Editor  of  the  Revvie  Blanche,  I 
was  to  write  an  article  in  English  which  would  be 
translated  into  French  and  inserted  in  the  paper 
over  my  name.  I  wrote  the  article  and  handed  it 
to  the  representative  of  the  Revue,  for  translation 
and  publication.  I  stipulated  for  a  proof  in  French, 
but  the  next  I  heard  about  the  matter  was  that  the 
article  had  appeared.  The  translator,  whoever  he 
was,  simply  took  my  article  as  a  sort  of  peg,  and 
hung  on  it  a  farrago  of  extremely  vicious  opinions, 
and  even  more  vicious  comparisons  which  I  had 
never  put  forward,  and  which  my  own  article  cer- 
tainly did  not  suggest.  I  complained  to  the  Editor 
of  the  Revue  at  the  time,  but  found  myself  unable 
to  obtain  any  redress,  and  there  was  nothing  more 
to  be  done.  The  French  article  passed  almost  un- 
noticed, inasmuch  as  the  Revue  Blanche  had  a  very 
limited  circulation,  and  I  never  heard  another  word 
about  it  until  years  after,  when  I  was  editing  The 
Academy,  In  that  paper  I  had  occasion  to  write  a 
paragraph  about  a  journal  called  The  Freethinker, 
which  was  edited  by  a  Mr.  Foote,  and  which  made  a 


Article  in  the  **Revue  Blanche''   187 

sort  of  business  of  blasphemy.  Mr.  Foote  was  not 
pleased  at  what  I  said  about  him  and,  by  way  of 
retort,  he  translated  a  particularly  nauseous  pas- 
sage from  the  Revue  Blanche  article,  inserted  it  in 
his  journal  and  accused  me  of  being  the  author.  I 
immediately  issued  a  writ  for  libel  against  the  pro- 
prietors of  the  Freethinker  J  and,  after  receiving  the 
writ,  Mr.  Foote  discovered  that  he  had  made  a 
serious  mistake  and  promptly  apologised  in  the  next 
issue  of  his  paper.  He  did  not  even  enter  an  ap- 
pearance. I  was  content  with  my  apology  and 
allowed  the  action  to  lapse. 

This  is  the  whole  truth  about  the  Revue  Blanche 
article.  Though  the  Revue  is  now  dead,  the  pro- 
prietor and  editor  are,  I  believe,  still  alive.  If,  as 
was  contended  in  the  Ransome  trial,  I  wrote  the 
article  I  am  said  to  have  written,  or  furnished  the 
material  for  it,  these  gentlemen  could  easily  have 
been  produced  to  say  so.  But  they  were  not  brought 
forward  as  witnesses  and  were  not  even  approached 
on  the  subject.  Yet  the  article  was  put  in  at  the 
trial  and,  though  I  said  on  oath  in  court  what  I  now 
say  here  in  print — and  my  assertion  was  not  in  the 
slightest  degree  shaken  by  cross-examination — Mr. 
Justice  Darling  persisted  in  reading  aloud,  and  for 
the  benefit  of  the  jury,  words  which  I  had  not  writ- 


188        Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

ten,  and  this  in  spite  of  my  explanations  and  protest. 
There  is  no  use  in  complaining,  nor  do  I  complain. 
I  merely  put  it  on  record  once  for  all,  that  the  Revue 
Blanche  article  is  not  my  article,  and  I  am  in  no 
way  responsible  for  it. 


CHAPTER  XV 

FIFTEEN  YEARS  OF  PERSECUTION 

I  Dp  not  think  it  is  an  exaggeration  to  say 
that  from  the  day  of  Oscar  Wilde's  sentence 
in  1887  down  to  the  Ransome  trial  in  1913 
not  a  single  week  had  passed  over  my  head  without 
some  unpleasantness  or  other  arising  in  conse- 
quence of  my  friendship  with  Oscar  Wilde.  Even 
before  Wilde  was  sent  to  prison  the  trouble  began. 
There  was  talk  and  gossip  almost  from  the  com- 
mencement of  our  acquaintanceship.  This  was 
largely  set  afoot  by  envious  people.  Wilde's  friends 
could  not  brook  that  we  should  be  so  constantly  to- 
gether, and  that  I  should — to  use  their  own  phrase 
— ''monopolise"  him. 

In  point  of  fact,  I  had  no  desire  to  monopolise 
him.  It  was  simply  impossible  to  shake  him  off. 
If  I  left  him  for  a  day  he  would  seek  me  out  and 
want  to  know  where  I  had  been  and  why  I  had 
not  asked  him  to  accompany  me.  If  I  went  abroad 
he  would  follow  me  and  either  entreat  me  to  return 
or  sit  down  solemnly  and  wait  my  time.     So  con- 

189 


190         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

tinually  were  we  together  that  our  friendship  be- 
came matter  for  public  comment  and  was  referred 
to  in  the  newspapers.  I  do  not  say  that  I  disliked 
all  this,  though  it  was  certainly  embarrassing  and 
even  annoying  at  times.  In  a  sense,  perhaps,  I  was 
rather  flattered.  I  have  always  been  fond  of  com- 
panionship, and  Wilde  was  undoubtedly  an  enter- 
taining companion  when  he  liked.  Besides  which 
he  was  famous  in  a  way,  and  it  is  not  always  un- 
pleasant to  go  about  with  famous  people,  partic- 
ularly when  they  happen  to  be  very  civil  to  one.  It 
is  a  fact  that  Wilde  could  not  bear  me  out  of  his 
sight.  If  we  happened  to  be  staying  together  and 
I  went  away  for  ten  minutes  without  telling  him 
where  I  was  going,  he  would  work  himself  up  into 
a  state  of  nervous  apprehension  and  rouse  a  whole 
hotel  with  his  enquiries. 

I  remember  that  when  we  were  at  a  hotel  in 
Algiers,  I  went  out  to  make  a  purchase  without 
mentioning  to  Wilde  that  I  was  going.  On  my 
return,  half  an  hour  later,  I  was  met  in  the  hall 
by  a  scared-looking  concierge,  who  said:  ''Mon- 
sieur, you  are  back !  Voire  papa  has  been  demand- 
ing to  know  where  you  were,  with  great  noise,  for 
the  last  hour !"  Wilde  happened  to  be  descending 
the  staircase  at  this  precise  moment  and  overheard 
what  the  man  had  said.     The  expression  ''voire 


Fifteen  Years  of  Persecution      191 

papa''  simply  drove  him  to  fury.  He  was  always 
vain  of  his  "youthful  appearance"  (though,  as  a 
matter  of  fact,  he  looked  much  older  than  his  age), 
and  he  jumped  to  the  conclusion  that  he  was  be- 
ginning to  look  old.  He  could  not  see  that  his 
anxious  queries  as  to  my  whereabouts  had  set  the 
hotel  people  thinking  that  he  must  stand  in  a  paren- 
tal relationship  to  the  object  of  his  solicitude.  For 
myself,  I  was  vastly  amused  and,  for  months  after, 
if  I  wished  to  make  Wilde  fearfully  angry,  I  had 
only  to  say  ''voire papa'' 

I  may,  perhaps,  explain  here  that  from  the  very 
beginning  I  always  treated  Wilde  in  the  way  I 
would  treat  any  other  friend  of  mine,  that  is  to 
say,  though  I  believed  him  to  be  a  great  man,  I 
never  had  any  awe  of  him,  and  I  never  flattered 
him.  Not  only  so,  but  at  times  I  made  a  great 
deal  of  fun  of  him,  and  there  were  occasions  when 
he  didn't  relish  it.  For  example,  he  had  been  talk- 
ing to  me  and  to  other  people  at  great  length  about 
Milton.  Somebody  in  a  paper  had  pointed  out  that 
certain  of  his  sonnets  had  a  Miltonic  echo  about 
them.  He  admitted  that  this  was  so,  but  said  that 
what  the  critic  called  an  echo  was  really  an  achieve- 
ment, and  that  he  had  wilfully  set  himself  to  write 
sonnets  like  Milton's,  which  should  be  as  good  as 
Milton's.    For  several  days  his  conversation  turned 


192        Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

in  the  same  direction,  and  in  the  end  I  began  to 
grow  a  little  weary  of  the  Milton- Wilde  amalgama- 
tion, and  told  him  that  it  was  quite  easy  to  write 
Miltonic  sonnets,  and  that  lots  of  people  could  do  it 
besides  Oscar  Wilde.  On  leaving  him  that  evening 
I  wrote  and  posted  to  him  the  following  sonnet, 
which,  I  need  hardly  say,  was  ''writ  sarcastic" : 

Oscar !  what  though  no  brazen  trumpet-call 
Of  Fame  hath  called  thee  to  the  foremost  van 
Of  life's  array,  though  not  from  man  to  man 
Thy  name  is  bandied,  though  thy  life  seem  small, 
Ignoble  in  men's  eyes;  the  Lord  of  all. 
Who  reads  the  heart  and  with  his  fearful  fan 
Purges  his  floor,  knows  thy  true  talisman — 
A  humble  soul  too  near  the  ground  to  fall. 

Therefore,  repine  not  if  thy  lot  obscure 
Seeks  quiet  ways  and  walks  not  with  the  crowd : 
A  kindly  heart  is  more  than  laurel  crown ; 
A  virtuous  life  builds  thrones  that  will  endure 
More  surely  than  the  Kingdoms  of  the  proud 
And  Thrift  shall  stand  when  Luxury  falls  down. 

Wilde  professed  to  take  this  ''undergraduate 
effusion"  seriously,  and  pronounced  it  to  be  "not 
bad,  for  an  amateur.''  But  we  heard  no  more  about 
Miltonic  sonnets. 

I  mention  these  things,  which  are  typical,  so  that 
the  reader  may  be  spared  the  conclusion  that  my 
friendship  with  Wilde  was  a  smooth  and  treacly 
affair ;  for  it  was  nothing  of  the  kind.    Indeed,  we 


Fifteen  Years  of  Persecution      193 

had  many  a  tiff  and  many  a  disagreement,  and  I 
wrote  no  end  of  skits  and  letters  to  him,  some  of 
them  not  over  civil ;  and  that  he  remembered  them 
and  that  they  hurt  him  much  more  keenly  than  I 
had  intended  is  shown  by  his  references  to  "loath- 
some" and  "brutal"  letters  received  from  me.  Any- 
thing that  displeased  Wilde  was  loathsome,  brutal, 
callous,  coarse,  and  so  forth.    If  I  wrote  and  said : — 

"My  dear  Oscar, 

"I  am  afraid  that  I  shall  not  be  able  to  come 
round  to  lunch  to-day  as  I  am  feeling  a  bit  off 
colour," 

I  could  count  on  getting  a  reply  in  some  such  terms 
as: — 

"I  have  received  your  callous  note.  If  you 
are  ill,  surely  you  can  say  so  without  using  coarse 
and  vulgar  expressions." 

I  took  precious  little  notice  of  these  missives  and, 
when  we  met  the  next  day,  neither  of  us  would  re- 
fer to  them. 

As  I  have  said,  people  gossipped  about  our  friend- 
ship and  exhibited  a  certain  amount  of  jealousy  of 
me;  but  I  was  not  then,  and  never  have  been,  dis- 
posed to  allow  third  parties  to  interfere  in  my 
friendships.  I  have  shown  what  happened  when 
my  own  father  attempted  to  make  differences  be- 


194         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

tween  us.  The  moment  Wilde  was  sentenced  things 
were  made  intolerable  for  me.  Lying  tales  as  to 
my  indifference  to  his  fate  reached  Wilde,  and  he 
was  told  that  I  was  about  to  publish  letters  of  his 
to  his  damage  and  my  own  monetary  profit.  The 
only  letters  of  Wilde's  I  ever  proposed  to  publish,  in 
my  life,  were  letters  which  contained  sentiments 
that  were  to  his  credit,  and  even  these  I  withdrew 
the  moment  I  heard  that  he  was  supposed  not  to 
wish  them  printed.  Not  only  was  every  effort  made 
to  embitter  and  estrange  Wilde  against  me  while 
he  was  in  prison,  but  I  was  being  continually 
assailed  by  impudent  rogues  who  professed  to  have 
information  and  documents  which  it  would  be  worth 
my  while  to  buy.  To  these  people  I  paid  neither 
the  smallest  heed  nor  the  smallest  of  monies.  They 
never  had  a  farthing  from  me,  nor  will  they  ever 
get  one.  I  was  threatened  with  "exposure''  by 
pretty  well  all  the  crawling  vermin  of  London  and 
Paris  for  months  after  the  trial.  I  knew  there  was 
nothing  to  expose,  so  that  I  was  not  particularly 
anxious;  but  seeing,  as  I  had  seen,  what  venom 
and  villainy  were  capable  of  doing  when  they  got 
fairly  to  work,  I  do  not  profess  that  these  threats 
were  pleasant  reading  of  a  morning  at  breakfast. 
Furthermore,  my  family  were  assailed  in  much  the 
same  way  and,  though  they  never  allowed  them- 


LADY    ALFRED    DOUGLAS 


Fifteen  Years  of  Persecution      195 

selves  to  be  victimised,  they  were  not  entirely  de- 
lighted with  the  constant  current  of  menace  which 
came  their  way. 

In  1902  I  married.  It  was  a  runaway  match, 
which  neither  myself  nor  my  wife  have  ever  re- 
pented. At  once,  however,  the  dastardly  attentions 
of  the  blackmailers,  letter-sellers  and  information 
mongers  were  directed  to  Lady  Alfred.  We  lived 
abroad  for  a  considerable  time  and,  though  the 
threats  had  been  bad  enough  while  we  were  away, 
they  assumed  a  double  fury  when  we  came  to  Eng- 
land. They  have  continued  with  greater  or  less 
frequency  ever  since.  The  people  who  wanted 
money  to  keep  quiet  have  fallen  off  unappeased  long 
ago.  But  the  kind  and  gentle  souls  who  imagined 
that  Lady  Alfred  Douglas  would  be  pleased  to  hear 
''something  dreadful"  about  her  husband  on  an 
anonymous  postcard  are  still  with  us  and  crop  up 
from  time  to  time  as  the  spirit  moves  them.  When 
I  took  over  the  editorship  of  The  Academy,  in  1907, 
the  fun  became  fast  and  furious.  We  could  not 
review  a  book  adversely  in  the  paper  without  being 
made  the  object  of  anonymous  threats  and  abuse 
with  reference  to  Wilde,  and  what  was  going  to  be 
done  to  us  if  we  didn't  look  out.  Persons  on  papers 
at  Oxford  and  Cambridge  wrote  paragraphs  about 
the  Editor  of  The  Academy  containing  veiled  sug- 


196         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

gestions  as  to  the  discreditable  character  of  his  for- 
mer relations  with  Wilde,  till  we  were  compelled  to 
take  legal  proceedings ;  then  they  fell  on  their  knees 
and  wept  bitterly  and  spoke  of  their  dying  fathers 
and  apologised  humbly  and  paid  our  costs.  I  sent 
my  friend  Crosland  down  to  see  the  Dons  of  one 
of  our  Universities  who  were  responsible  for  a 
certain  publication,  and  he  sat  solemnly  with  these 
learned  and  reverend  signors,  in  the  cloistered  se- 
clusion of College,  while  they  solemnly  settled 

the  terms  of  an  apology  and  tried  to  make  the  costs 
pounds  instead  of  guineas  by  promising  to  dismiss 
their  editor.  From  time  to  time,  too,  outsiders  took 
a  hand  at  the  game.  It  was  through  the  tender 
offices  of  these  people  that  I  had  steady  reminders 
of  the  existence  of  mysterious  letters  which  were 
being  held  by  one  of  them,  and  which  were  to  be 
produced  for  my  destruction  when  this  gentleman 
might  deem  the  occasion  to  have  arisen. 


CHAPTER  XVI 
wilde's  poetry 

WILDE  once  said  to  me  when  we  were 
discussing  poetry  that  there  were  two 
ways  of  disHking  poetry — one  being  to 
disHke  it,  and  the  other  to  Hke  Pope.  This  remark 
was  brought  forth  really  by  Aubrey  Beardsley,  who 
was  present,  and  who  said  that  for  him,  at  any  rate, 
there  was  only  one  English  poet,  namely.  Pope.  It 
is  highly  characteristic  of  Wilde,  who,  although 
he  insisted  on  his  own  eminence  as  a  poet  and  a 
critic  of  poetry,  never  committed  himself  to  what 
might  be  considered  a  serious  theory  on  the  subject. 
Piecing  together  the  views  he  expressed  from  time 
to  time  in  a  casual  and  general  way,  I  am  convinced, 
indeed,  that  he  had  no  theory  which  was  in  the  least 
stable  or  cogent  and  which  was  not  liable  to  be 
altered  by  the  moment's  whim  or  mood.  It  is  cer- 
tain that,  while  he  hankered  after  poetic  distinction 
and  in  his  early  manhood  strove  after  it,  his  aim 
was  not  so  much  to  produce  great  poetry  as  to  turn 

out  stuff  which  would  provoke  the  critics  to  write 

197 


198         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

about  him  and  the  witlings  to  talk  about  him.  He 
published  a  volume  of  poems  when  he  was  twenty- 
six  years  of  age,  but  after  that  he  produced  next  to 
nothing  poetical  till  he  wrote  the  ''Ballad  of  Read- 
ing Gaol."  "The  Sphinx/'  it  is  true,  was  published 
in  1894,  but  it  had  been  written  many  years  before. 
In  his  preface  to  "Wilde's  Selected  Poems,"  Mr. 
Ross  tells  us  that  Wilde's  early  work  was  never 
''until  recently"  well  received  by  the  critics.  He 
adds,  however,  that  "they  have  survived  the  test 
of  nine  editions,"  with  the  "nine"  in  capital  letters. 
For  myself,  I  do  not  admit  that  the  poems  have  been 
well  received  by  criticism,  even  recently,  for  the  very 
simple  reason  that  there  is  very  little  in  them  to  re- 
ceive. Of  course,  it  is  unfair  to  apply  the  test  of  "re- 
ception" to  any  poetry  that  is  worth  talking  about, 
just  as  it  is  unfair  to  rely  on  the  test  of  editions.  To 
take  an  instance  in  point :  there  is  Miss  Ella  Wheeler 
Wilcox,  who  has  been  received  with  all  manner  of 
plaudits  by  all  manner  of  reviewers  and  whose 
works  have  stood  the  test  of  probably  ninety  edi- 
tions. But  who  in  his  senses  is  going  to  tell  us 
that  this  estimable  lady  is  a  great  poetess  and  to 
be  mentioned  in  the  same  breath  as — say — Mrs. 
Browning  or  Mrs.  Meynell,  the  latter  of  whom,  at 
any  rate,  has  not  achieved  even  so  many  editions 
as  Wilde?     It  is  plain  that  the  only  real  test  of 


Wilde's  Poetry  199 

poetry  is  its  quality,  and  neither  its  reception  nor  its 
saleability  can  affect  that  quality.  If  we  apply  such 
a  test  to  Wilde's  early  poetical  work,  which  repre- 
sents the  bulk  of  what  he  accomplished,  we  shall  not 
find  that  he  shines  with  anything  like  the  effulgence 
that  his  adherents  have  imagined  for  him.  Wilde 
himself  knew  that  he  was  not  a  great  poet.  His 
cry  is,  continually:  '*I  am  an  artist — the  supreme 
artist,  in  fact,''  and  never :  '1  am  a  poet,"  or  "I  am 
the  supreme  poet."  He  knew  perfectly  well  that 
that  cock  wouldn't  fight.  He  was  not  even  anxious 
to  be  known  as  a  poet  in  the  way  that  some  of  his 
contemporaries  were  anxious  to  be  known.  He  told 
me  that  to  be  dubbed  "poet"  was  to  raise  up  visions 
of  untidy  hair,  dirty  linen,  and  no  dinner  to  speak 
of,  and  such  a  view  of  himself  he  abhorred.  ''Never 
be  a  poet,  my  dear  Bosie:  be  a  gentleman,  a  con- 
noisseur, an  artist — what  you  will;  but  not  a  poet- 
Let  us  leave  being  a  poet  to  Dowson  and  Arthur 
Symons  and,  if  you  like,  Dick  Le  Gallienne."  All 
Wilde's  biographers  have  striven  manfully  and — 
one  might  say — pitifully  to  make  a  great  poet  out 
of  Oscar  Wilde,  and  they  have  failed.  Even  Mr. 
Ransome,  the  most  zealous  of  the  bunch,  cannot 
bring  himself  to  any  more  flattering  conclusion  than 
that  Wilde  was  a  sort  of  inspired  plagiarist  or  imi- 
tator who,  in  Mr.  Ransome's  view,  improved  upon 


200         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

what  he  appropriated.  Nobody  who  has  read  any 
poetry  other  than  Wilde's  can  fail  to  perceive  that, 
leaving  out  the  ''Ballad  of  Reading  Gaol"  and,  up  to 
a  point,  'The  Sphinx,''  Wilde's  poetical  work  con- 
sists of  clever,  and  occasionally,  perhaps,  brilliant 
imitations.  Wherever  one  turns  in  the  three  hun- 
dred pages  of  his  published  poems  one  finds  echoes 
— and  little  else  but  echoes.  His  sonnets  are,  for 
the  most  part,  Miltonic  in  their  eflfects;  the  metre 
and  method  of  "In  Memoriam"  are  used  in  the 
greater  number  of  his  lyrics ;  and  he  uses  the  metre 
which  Tennyson  sealed  to  himself  for  all  time  even 
in  "The  Sphinx,"  which  is  his  great  set  work;  while 
in  such  pieces  as  "Charmides,"  "Panthea,"  "Hu- 
manitad"  and  "The  Burden  of  Itys"  he  borrows  the 
grave  pipe  of  Matthew  Arnold  and  what  he  himself 
called  the  silver-keyed  flute  of  Keats.  Haphazard, 
I  take  up  the  Ross-edited  volume  "Poems  by  Oscar 
Wilde,"  and  I  open,  on  page  two  hundred  and 
twenty-two — "La  Mer": — 

A  white  mist  drifts  across  the  shrouds, 
A  wild  moon  in  this  wintry  sky 
Gleams,  like  an  angry  lion's  eye. 
Out  of  a  mane  of  tawny  clouds. 

The  muffled  steersman  at  the  wheel 

Is  but  a  shadow  in  the  gloom:  • 

And  in  the  throbbing  engine-room 

Leap  the  long  rods  of  polished  steel. 


Wilde's  Poetry  201 

The  shattered  storm  has  left  its  trace 
Upon  this  huge  and  heaving  dome. 
For  the  thin  threads  of  yellow  foam 
Float  on  the  waves,  like  ravelled  lace. 

The  bird  is  Wilde,  the  plumage  and  call  are  Tenny- 
son's to  a  fault. 

Then  again,  on  page  one  hundred  and  thirty- 
six: — 

To  outer  senses  there  is  peace, 
A  dreamy  peace  on  either  hand ; 
Deep  silence  in  the  shadowy  land, 
Deep  silence  where  the  shadows  cease; 

Save  for  a  cry  that  echoes  shrill 
From  some  lone  bird  disconsolate: 
A  corn-crake  calling  to  its  mate. 
The  answer  from  the  misty  hill. 

\ 
And  suddenly  the  moon  withdraws 
Her  sickle  from  the  lightening  skies, 
And  to  her  sombre  cavern  flies, 
Wrapped  in  a  veil  of  yellow  gauze. 

More  Tennyson,  with  the  "In  Memoriam'*  verse 
lines  arbitrarily  and  wrongfully  disposed  for  the 
deception  of  the  innocent.  I  might  go  on  quoting 
from  Wilde  in  the  metre  ad  nauseam  and  never 
strike  so  much  as  four  lines  which  can  be  pro- 
nounced to  be  pure  Wilde.  With  "The  Sphinx/' 
as  a  whole,  I  shall  deal  later;  but  I  may  point  out 


202         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

here  that  while  Wilde  arranges  the  stanzas  as 
though  they  consisted  of  two  lines,  they  really  con- 
sist of  Tennyson's  four  and,  for  correctness'  sake, 
should  have  been  printed  thus : — 

In  a  dim  corner  of  my  room 

For  longer  than  my  fancy  thinks, 
A  beautiful  and  silent  Sphinx 

Has  watched  me  through  the  shifting  gloom. 

Inviolate  and  immobile, 

She  does  not  rise,  she  does  not  stir; 

For  silver  moons  are  naught  to  her. 
And  naught  to  her  the  suns  that  reel. 

Tennyson's  suns  as  well  as  Tennyson's  stanza!  I 
am  not  suggesting  that  all  this  is  otherwise  than 
neat  and  deft  and  skilful  and  pleasing,  but  a  poet 
of  parts,  leaving  out  the  "true  poet"  so  beloved  of 
Mr.  Ross,  should  surely  have  a  note  or  tone  or 
cadence  of  his  own,  and  not  warble  so  distressingly 
like  the  "true  poet"  in  the  next  street.  As  the  Wilde 
faction  appear  to  be  acquainted  with  no  poetry  but 
"poor  dear  Oscar's,"  I  will  take  a  few  passages 
from  "In  Memoriam,"  which,  while  they  will  be 
familiar  to  the  more  intelligent  reader,  will  doubt- 
less come  in  the  way  of  an  eye-opener  to  people 
like  Mr.  Ross.  Let  us  repeat,  to  begin  with,  the 
second  verse  of  "La  Mer" : — 


Wilde's  Poetry  203 

The  muffled  steersman  at  the  wheel 
Is  but  a  shadow  in  the  gloom: 
And  in  the  throbbing  engine-room 
Leaps  the  long  rods  of  polished  steel. 

This  is,  as  we  have  seen,  Wilde.  Against  it  let  us 
put  Tennyson's 

I  hear  the  noise  about  the  keel, 
I  hear  the  bell  struck  in  the  night ; 
I  see  the  cabin-window  bright ; 

I  see  the  sailor  at  the  wheel. 

If  ever  there  was  an  impudent  and  unblushing 
*'crib/'  surely  we  have  it  here !  I  wonder  what  the 
Ransomes,  Sherards,  Harrises  and  Inglebys  of  this 
little  world  would  say  if  they  caught  anybody  else 
but  Wilde  at  pretty  little  tricks  of  this  kind.  In 
Wilde  such  childish  conveyance  must  be  excused 
and  even  held  up  to  admiration;  in  another  it  would 
be  sheer  theft.  Then,  again,  take  the  second  set  of 
stanzas  I  have  quoted  from  Wilde,  about  peace  and 
silence,  and  compare  them  with  the  following  from 
"In  Memoriam": — 

Calm  is  the  morn,  without  a  sound, 
Calm  as  to  suit  a  calmer  grief, 
And  only  through  the  faded  leaf 

The  chestnut  pattering  to  the  ground: 

Calm  and  deep  peace  on  this  high  wold, 
And  on  these  dews  that  drench  the  furze. 
And  all  the  silvery  gossamers 

That  twinkle  into  green  and  gold : 


204         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

Calm  and  still  light  on  yon  great  plain 
That  sweeps  with  all  its  autumn  bowers. 
And  crowded  farms  and  lessening  towers, 

To  mingle  with  the  bounding  main: 

Calm  and  deep  peace  in  this  wide  air. 
These  leaves  that  redden  to  the  fall; 
And  in  my  heart,  if  calm  at  all, 

If  any  calm,  a  calm  despair: 

Wilde's  verses  are  plainly  a  paraphrase — and  a  bad 
one  to  boot.  It  will  be  urged  that  he  wrote  these  in 
his  youth,  and  that  all  poets,  more  or  less,  echo  one 
another  when  they  are  young.  But  when  one  comes 
to  consider  that  out  of  the  forty  or  so  lyrical  pieces 
which  Wilde  wrote  no  fewer  than  eighteen  are  in 
the  metre  of  "In  Memoriam,''  and  not  one  of  them 
is  free  from  images,  phrases  or  cadences  which  can 
easily  be  paralleled  out  of  Tennyson,  while  the  whole 
of  "The  Sphinx"  is  open  to  criticism  on  the  same 
grounds,  one  cannot  doubt  that  Oscar  Wilde  is  a 
poet  who  has  rather  overdone  the  youthful  imitation 
business ;  and  one  can  scarcely  be  expected  to  break 
the  alabaster  box  of  critical  adulation  at  his  feet. 
I  have  not  space  to  enter  into  great  detail  with 
regard  to  those  lyrics  of  Wilde  which  are  not  flatly 
Tennysonian.  There  are  about  twenty  of  them, 
and  they  include  a  cheap  imitation  of  "La  Belle 
Dame  sans  Merci,''  a  flagrant  copy  of  Hood's  lines 


Wilde's  Poetry  205 

beginning  'Take  her  up  tenderly,"  and  sundry 
pieces  which  are  childishly  reminiscent  of  Mrs. 
Browning,  William  Morris  and  even  Jean  Ingelow. 
Of  his  own  initiative,  Mr.  Ross  heads  up  this  col- 
lection of  poetical  brummagem  with  such  taking 
titles  as  ''Eleutheria,''  ''Windflowers,"  'Tlowers  of 
Gold,''  "The  Fourth  Movement''  and  "Flowers  of 
Love."  But  the  fact  that  they  are  wood-pulp  or 
ceraceous  replicas  of  other  people's  nosegays  is  of 
no  account  to  the  faithful  and  the  blind. 

As  regards  the  sonnets,  which  may,  perhaps,  be 
said  to  constitute  that  part  of  Wilde's  poetical  work 
which  is  best  worth  consideration,  I  have  only  to  say 
that  while  it  would  be  tedious  to  compare  them 
side  by  side  with  the  sonnets  of  Milton  and  other 
writers,  such  a  comparison  cannot  fail  to  convince 
any  reasonable  being  that  in  this  department  again 
Wilde  was  an  over-sedulous  ape — so  over-sedulous, 
in  fact,  that  he  is  careful  to  emphasise  and  exag- 
gerate the  very  faults  and  defects  of  his  masters. 
On  the  point  of  technique,  the  importance  of  which 
cannot  be  too  gravely  insisted  upon  where  the  son- 
net form  is  concerned,  he  is  continuously  and  hope- 
lessly at  fault.  His  rhyme-sounds  are,  for  the  most 
part,  of  the  cheapest  and  the  most  hackneyed.  Of 
the  twenty-eight  sonnets  which  he  produced,  seven 
have  rhymes  to  ''play,"  "say,"  ''day,"  and  so  forth; 


206         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

rhymes  to  *'see,"  "be"  and  ''me"  are  common,  and 
in  even  greater  number;  and  on  no  fewer  than 
twenty-one  distinct  occasions  are  we  proffered  such 
rhymes  as  ''liberty/'  "anarchy,"  "memory,"  "de- 
mocracy," "already,"  "victory,"  "luxury,"  and  the 
like,  or  an  average  of  three  times  in  every  four 
sonnets.  And  this,  if  you  please,  is  the  work  of 
"the  supreme  artivSt!" 

It  follows  without  saying  that  while  Wilde  be- 
lieved himself  to  be  writing  in  the  Italian  sonnet 
form,  he  persistently  finds  himself  unable  to  ad- 
here to  the  difficult  rules  of  that  form.  He  has 
octaves  with  four  rhymes  in  them  instead  of  two, 
and  he  will  wind  up  a  sextet  with  a  couplet  like 
the  veriest  tyro  of  them  all.  The  contents  of  the 
sonnets  represent  the  best  of  Wilde's  thought, 
being,  for  the  most  part,  free  from  fleshliness,  cyni- 
cism and  perversity.  Yet,  when  one  has  said  this 
for  it,  one  has  said  all.  There  is  nowhere  anything 
very  great  or  very  noble  or  very  beautiful,  and  one 
never  catches  even  a  suggestion  of  the  large  accent 
which  makes  a  poet.  Sententiousness,  grandiose- 
ness,  and  a  laboured  classicism  set  forward  with  the 
help  of  an  artificial  rhetoric  which  at  times  is  almost 
comic  are  the  upshot  of  Wilde's  sonnets  taken  gen- 
erally and  in  the  lump. 

There  now  remain  the  set  pieces  such  as  "A  Gar- 


Wilde's  Poetry  207 

den  of  Eros/'  a  la  Matthew  Arnold;  "The  New 
Helen,"  a  la  Keats;  "The  Burden  of  Itys,"  a  la 
Matthew  Arnold  again;  "Panthea,"  a  blend  of 
Matthew  Arnold  and  Keats;  and  "Humanitad," 
more  Arnold;  also  "The  Sphinx''  and  the  "Ballad  of 
Reading  Gaol."  No  lover  of  poetry  in  a  high  sense 
is  likely  to  waste  much  time  in  the  perusal  of  the 
five  pieces  first  mentioned.  It  is  not  claimed  for 
them  by  anybody  that  they  are  other  than  cold  and 
super-painted  failures,  produced  in  the  spirit  of 
"Now,  let  me  show  you  what  I,  the  scholar  and  a 
connoisseur,  can  do,"  rather  than  by  any  spiritual  or 
poetical  impulsion.  Only  the  meagrest  portions  of 
them  can  be  admired,  even  by  the  elect;  and  these 
portions  are  not  edifying. 

As  for  "The  Sphinx,"  even  if  we  concede  that 
the  uneasy  effect  of  its  metre  be  dismissed  from  the 
question,  we  have  left  what  is — on  the  face  of  it — 
a  work  of  not  always  too  successful  virtuosity  on  a 
theme  which  is  frankly  bestial.  There  is  an  un- 
doubted pomp  and  swing  about  some  of  the  stanzas ; 
there  are  pictures  well  visualised  and  put  on  the 
canvas  with  a  fine  eye  for  colour;  and  the  element 
of  curiousness  or  weirdness  is  well  sustained;  but 
right  through  the  piece  one  is  made  to  feel  that  it  is 
not  the  poet  but  the  mechanician  who  has  come  be- 
fore us,  and  continually  he  creaks  and  whirrs,  as  it 


208         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

were,  for  want  of  oil  and  control.  Wilde,  doubt- 
less, set  out  to  build  a  jewelled  palace  for  his  dubious 
and,  if  you  come  to  look  at  it  closely,  loathsome 
fancy.  He  has  succeeded  only  in  establishing  a 
sort  of  Wardour  Street  receptacle  for  old,  tarnished 
and  too-vividly-coloured  lots.  His  efforts  to  do 
things  in  the  most  dazzling  and  wizardly  manner 
are  at  times  ludicrous,  and  his  endeavours  to  get  up 
unthinkable  passions  provoke  one  to  laughter  rather 
than  awe.  In  a  despairing  determination  to  tie  to 
the  end  of  the  poem  something  on  which  a  reason- 
able being  might  ponder,  he  becomes  utterly  in- 
consequential. 

False  Sphinx!     False  Sphinx!    By  reedy  Styx  old  Charon 

leaning  on  his  oar, 
Waits  for  my  coin.     Go  thou  before,  and  leave  me  to  my 

crucifix. 
Whose  pallid  burden,  sick  with  pain,  watches  the  world  with 

wearied  eyes. 
And  weeps  for  every  soul  that  dies,  and  weeps  for  every  soul 

in  vain. 

The  dragging  in  of  this  bit  of  specious  religiosity 
as  a  bonne  bouche  after  an  orgy  of  flamboyant 
passion-slaking  is,  doubtless,  very  cunning  and 
clever,  but  it  has  nothing  to  do  with  either  great 
art  on  the  one  hand  or  common  sense  on  the  other. 
'The  Sphinx''  is  a  poem  which  may  well  have 
stirred  certain   resorts   in   the   neighbourhood   of 


Wilde's  Poetry  209 

Piccadilly  Circus  to  their  foundations.  It  is  a  poem 
for  the  perverse  and  the  "curious,"  but  its  value  as 
art  or  poetry  is  next  door  to  negligible. 

I  have  already  said  that  in  my  view  the  ''Ballad 
of  Reading  Gaol"  is  the  only  poem  of  Wilde's  which 
is  likely  to  endure.  It  is  as  different  from  his  pre- 
vious work  as  chalk  is  different  from  cheese,  and 
to  read  it  after  perusal  of  'The  Sphinx"  or  the 
sonnets,  it  might  almost  be  the  work  of  another 
hand.  In  point  of  fact,  it  was  indeed  written  by 
a  Wilde  who  had  very  little  in  common,  whether 
intellectually  or  artistically,  with  the  Wilde  of  the 
bulk  of  the  poems.  Up  to  the  time  of  his  imprison- 
ment Oscar  Wilde,  poet,  had  encouraged,  or  pre- 
tended to  encourage,  certain  very  grave  fallacies 
with  regard  to  poetry.  He  asserted — largely,  I 
think,  because  he  knew  himself  to  be  incapable  of 
sincerity — that  poetry  was,  in  its  essence,  a  matter 
of  pretence  and  artifice.  He  held  that  style  was 
everything,  and  feeling  nothing;  that  poetry  should 
be  removed  as  well  from  material  actuality  as  from 
the  actuality  of  the  spirit,  and  that  no  great  poet 
had  ever  in  his  greatest  moments  been  other  than 
insincere.  He  professed  other  odd  views  and  used 
roundly  to  assert  that  he  would  rather  have  written 
Swinburne's  "Poems  and  Ballads"  than  anything 
else  in  literature;  and  that  Shakespeare  was  not, 


210         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

after  all,  a  very  great  poet.  I  remember  that  when 
some  idiot  talked  of  starting  an  "Anti-Shake- 
speare Society,"  on  the  ground  that  "Shakespeare 
never  wrote  a  line  of  poetry  in  his  life,"  Wilde  was 
vastly  tickled  by  the  idea,  and  said  that  Shakespeare 
had  been  much  overrated.  He  would  have  it  that 
Webster's  "Duchess  of  Malfi"  was  a  much  better 
play  and  much  better  poetry  than  any  of  Shake- 
speare's, and,  as  he  admired  little  that  he  did  not 
sooner  or  later  try  to  imitate,  it  is  possible  that  we 
owe  his  "Duchess  of  Padua"  to  this  view.  In  any 
case,  up  to  the  time  of  his  going  to  prison,  there  can 
be  no  question  that  Wilde  was  peculiar  and  in  a  great 
measure  heretical  in  his  notions  about  what  poetry 
should  be.  His  opinions  may  or  may  not  have 
altered  while  he  was  in  prison.  I  never  heard  him 
renounce  them,  but  after  he  came  out  he  did  arrive 
at  a  perception  of  the  fact  that  a  poet  who  wishes 
to  be  heard  must  make  his  appeal  to  the  human 
heart  as  well  as  to  the  intellect,  and  that  perversity 
is  never  by  any  chance  poetry.  And  so  he  set  about 
the  "Ballad  of  Reading  Gaol."  Even  here,  how- 
ever, he  could  not  walk  alone.  He  must  have 
models,  and  his  actual  model  was  "The  Dream  of 
Eugene  Aram,"  with  "The  Ancient  Mariner" 
thrown  in  on  technical  grounds.  The  result,  of 
course,  far  outdistances  "Eugene  Aram,"  just  as 


Wilde's  Poetry  211 

in  certain  ultimate  qualities  it  falls  far  short  of 
"The  Ancient  Mariner/'  It  is  sufficient  for  us  that 
in  the  ''Ballad  of  Reading  GaoF'  we  have  a  sus- 
tained poem  of  sublimated  actuality  and  of  a 
breadth  and  sweep  and  poignancy  such  as  had  never 
before  been  attained  in  this  line.  The  emotional 
appeal  is,  on  the  whole,  quite  legitimate  and,  if  we 
except  a  very  few  passages  in  which  the  old  Adam 
Wilde  crops  out,  the  established  tradition  as  to 
what  is  fitting  and  comely  in  a  poem  of  this  nature 
is  not  outraged  or  transgressed.  Because  of  this 
and  the  general  skill  and  deftness  of  its  workman- 
ship, the  poem  will  last,  and,  though  I  cannot  agree 
with  those  critics  who  desire  to  place  Wilde  among 
the  Immortals,  I  am  certainly  of  opinion  that  it  is 
on  the  ''Ballad  of  Reading  GaoF'  and  on  the  "Bal- 
lad of  Reading  GsloV  alone  that  his  reputation 
among  posterity  will  stand. 

The  placing  of  poets  and  poetry  in  their  proper 
relation  to  the  mass  of  literature  is  no  fool's  job, 
and  I  am  aware  that  the  opinion  of  one  age  is  fre- 
quently stultified  by  the  opinion  of  the  next.  But 
this  is  not  true  of  great  work.  I  think  it  can  be 
established  that  all  great  work  has  been  admired 
and  treasured  from  the  beginning.  From  time  to 
time,  too,  the  vast  quantities  of  mediocre  and  insig- 
nificant work  is  also  admired,  but  in  the  nature  of 


212         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

things  there  is  no  vitality  about  it  and,  despite  the 
p3ean  of  fools,  it  perishes.  Much  that  Wilde  has 
strung  into  verse  will  so  perish.  The  "Ballad"  may 
persist  and  save  him  from  the  oblivion  which  he 
seems  to  me  assiduously  to  have  courted. 


CHAPTER  XVII 

THE   PLAYS   AND   PROSE   WORKS 

I  HAVE  demonstrated  in  the  foregoing  chapter 
the  absolute  folly  of  Wilde's  claim  to  suprem- 
acy as  an  artist.  It  is  a  claim  which  would 
never  have  been  put  forward  for  him  if  he  had  not 
put  it  forward  for  himself,  but  it  is  a  claim  which 
his  adherents  have  constantly  reiterated  since  his 
death,  with  nobody  to  gainsay  them ;  and  so  vocif- 
erous and  persistent  have  these  people  been  that 
the  idea  of  Wilde's  supreme  artistry  has  come  to  be 
accepted  without  question  by  a  gaping  public  and 
to  pass  current  as  good,  sound,  critical  coin  even 
among  the  cultivated.  Wilde  the  supreme  artist 
in  the  capacity  of  poet  does  not  exist  and  never  has 
existed.  We  have  now  to  turn  to  Wilde  the 
supreme  proseman.  The  Ross-Ransome  faction  are 
nothing  if  not  wonderful  in  this  regard.  Their  one 
cry,  which  they  repeat  with  parrot-like  iteration  and 
to  which  they  cling  as  a  drowning  critic  might  cling 
to  critical  straws,  is  this — Wilde's  own  saying: 
"The  fact  of  a  man  being  a  poisoner  is  nothing 

213 


214         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

against  his  prose/'  Now,  this  is  such  a  truism 
that,  of  itself,  it  is  not  worth  talking  about,  but 
it  has  been  put  up  for  the  defence  and  glorification 
of  Wilde,  in  and  out  of  season.  Even  our  great 
literary  judge,  Mr.  Justice  Darling,  takes  his  cue 
from  this  remark  and  tells  twelve  English  jurymen 
that  because  a  man  was  a  bad  man,  that  is  not 
to  say  that  we  are  to  refrain  from  reading  his  books, 
and  so  on.  But  all  these  people  miss  the  real  point, 
which  is  that,  though  the  fact  of  a  man  being  a 
poisoner  is  nothing  against  his  prose,  it  is  equally, 
and  just  as  clearly,  nothing  for  it.  Without  going 
further  into  the  question  at  the  moment,  I  shall 
venture  to  deal  with  Wilde's  prose  writings  on  the 
assumption  that  if  they  are  no  worse  they  are 
certainly  no  better  through  the  fact  of  the  shame- 
fulness  of  his  life.  Wilde  himself  never  made  any 
great  fuss  about  his  prose  writings  other  than  the 
plays.  He  regarded — and  very  properly  regarded — 
the  essays  in  'Intentions,"  together  with  the  fairy 
tales  and  his  other  stories  (excepting,  of  course, 
'The  Picture  of  Dorian  Gray"),  as  so  much  donkey 
work,  and  pretty  well  on  the  level  with  his  lectures, 
which  were  written  for  the  pure  purpose  of  getting 
money  and  with  no  eye  to  ''supreme  artistry."  "In- 
tentions" was  first  published  in  1891.  Three  years 
went  by  before  the  book  passed  into  its  second  edi- 


The  Plays  and  Prose  Works      215 

tion.  The  first  edition  was  published  at  7s.  6d.,  and 
I  believe  I  am  right  in  saying  that  the  second  edi- 
tion, published  at  3s.  6d.,  was  simply  a  "remainder'' 
of  the  first  in  a  cheaper  binding.  It  was  not  till 
after  Wilde's  imprisonment  and  death  and  after  the 
''boosters"  had  been  at  work  on  him  for  some  years 
that  we  began  to  hear  of  the  marvellous  artistry 
and  genius  which  this  volume  is  alleged  to  exhibit. 
Wilde  himself  would  have  laughed  in  his  sleeve  if 
he  could  have  been  told  that  such  preposterous 
claims  would  ever  be  made  for  his  pot-boiling  fleers 
and  ironies.  He  knew  that  the  ''Decay  of  Lying/' 
the  "Critic  as  Artist"  and  the  "Truth  of  Masks" 
were,  in  a  large  measure,  cribbed  from  Whistler, 
and  he  knew  that  "Pen,  Pencil  and  Poison"  was  the 
merest  review  article,  and  neither  better  nor  worse 
than  the  average  stodginess  which  the  public  of  his 
day  accepted  from  their  somnolent  monthlies.  The 
doctrine  in  these  papers  will  not  bear  examination. 
When  it  is  good  it  is  not  Wilde's,  and  when  it  is 
bad  it  is  horrid,  and  not  necessarily  Wilde's  at  that. 
It  is  studded  with  such  clap-trap  statements  as  "All 
art  is  immoral" ;  "Society  often  forgives  the  crim- 
inal: it  never  forgives  the  dreamer";  "There  is  no 
sin  except  stupidity";  "The  Greeks  had  no  art 
critics" ;  "It  is  difficult  not  to  be  unjust  to  what  one 
loves" ;  "His  crimes  gave  strong  personality  to  his 


216         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

style'';  ''I  am  prepared  to  prove  anything'';  "The 
more  we  study  art  the  less  we  care  for  nature"; 
''Shakespeare  is  too  fond  of  going  directly  to  life 
and  borrowing  life's  natural  utterance" ;  "Meredith 
is  a  prose  Browning — and  so  is  Browning" ;  "I  live 
in  terror  of  not  being  misunderstood" ;  "To  have  a 
capacity  for  a  passion  and  not  to  realise  it  is  to 
make  oneself  incomplete  and  limited."  And  so 
we  might  continue,  to  the  complete  exasperation  of 
reason  and  decency.  Pernicious  and  scurrilous 
stuff  was  always  in  Wilde's  bosom,  and  if  he  could 
get  it  off  in  a  sly  way  while  pretending  to  discuss 
serious  matters  in  a  serious  sense  he  was  delighted. 
His  doctrine  was  nothing  more  or  less  than  a  doc- 
trine of  smart  negation.  That  he  had  literary  skill 
enough  and  wit  and  scholarship  enough  to  be  enter- 
taining nobody  wishes  to  deny,  but  the  cultivated 
people  whom  he  entertains  place  no  value  upon  his 
opinions.  It  is  the  middling-minded  who  are  not 
entertained,  and  yet  take  him  for  gospel  and  allow 
such  intellectuality  as  they  may  possess  to  be  dam- 
aged and  warped  by  his  insincerities.  On  the  whole, 
therefore,  I  say  that  "Intentions"  will  not  do  if  we 
are  to  consider  Wilde  in  the  light  of  a  serious  and 
illuminating  thinker. 

On  the  ground  of  artistry,  style  and  so  forth 
the  book  is  not  by  any  means  flawless.    That  Wilde 


The  Plays  and  Prose  Works      217 

had  a  good,  easy  prose  style  and  did,  at  times,  write 
accomplished  prose  I  admit;  but  in  this  regard  he 
stands  on  no  better  level  than  Mr.  Frank  Harris  or 
Mr.  Gilbert  Chesterton.  All  three  of  them — Wilde, 
Harris  and  Chesterton — are  killed  by  the  exuber- 
ance of  their  own  facility.  They  have  the  pen  of  the 
ready  writer  and  they  fall  accordingly.  Moreover, 
Wilde  is  prone  to  the  over-sugared  and  over-gilded 
passage ;  even  though  he  can  be  as  bald  as  the  bald- 
est and  as  limping  as  the  lamest.  Of  his  minor 
defects  I  will  say  nothing,  except  that  his  split 
infinitives  are  a  standing  disgrace  to  him. 

We  may  now  pass  to  his  stories.  I  have  always 
held  that  if  Wilde  was  anything  at  all  he  was  an 
inventor  of  stories.  Such  social  success  as  he  ever 
attained  was  almost  entirely  due  to  this  gift  coupled 
with  a  remarkable  delivery  and  a  good  voice.  "I 
have  thought  of  a  story"  was  an  announcement  for 
ever  on  his  lips,  and  his  intimates  knew  that  five 
times  out  of  six  the  story  would  be  worth  listening 
to.  When  I  first  knew  him  his  pet  stories  were  of 
the  order  of  the  inverted  fable;  somewhat  in  the 
manner  of  the  fables  of  Ambrose  Bierce.  Two  ex- 
amples which  have  never  been  published  I  may  set 
down  here.  One  of  them  is  what  Wilde  called  'The 
True  Story  of  Androcles  and  the  Lion.''  He  said 
that  though  Androcles  may  have  been  an  early 


218         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

Christian  slave,  he  was  also  a  dentist.  A  certain 
lion  found  himself  suffering  from  severe  toothache 
and  consulted  Androcles  on  the  subject.  The 
dentist  advised  gold  filling  for  the  back  teeth  and 
an  entirely  new  set  of  teeth  for  the  upper  jaw  or 
mandible.  Later,  Androcles,  because  he  was  a  good 
Christian,  was  thrown  to  the  lions  or,  rather,  to  a 
lion,  and  perceiving  when  the  beast  was  let  loose 
upon  him  that  here  was  an  old  friend,  approached 
him  with  joy,  feeling  sure  that  the  lion  would  not 
hurt  him  inasmuch  as  he  had  made  no  charge  for 
the  gold  filling  and  the  upper  set  of  teeth.  But  the 
King  of  Beasts  had  other  views  and  promptly  tore 
Androcles  to  pieces,  and  chewed  him  up  with  the 
very  teeth  which  had  been  so  kindly  and  generously 
supplied  to  him. 

And  the  other  story  was  called  'Tresence  of 
Mind."  *'In  a  theatre  in  America,"  said  Wilde, 
''there  was  a  young  flute-player  who  was  gifted 
with  an  extraordinary  presence  of  mind.  One 
evening  some  of  the  scenery  caught  fire  and,  as  the 
smoke  and  flames  began  to  rush  into  the  building, 
the  audience  prepared  to  flee.  Whereupon,  with 
singular  presence  of  mind,  the  young  flute-player 
jumped  out  of  his  seat  and,  holding  up  a  lily-white 
hand,  cried  in  stentorian  tones:  There  is  no 
danger!'    In  consequence  of  these  words  the  audi- 


The  Plays  and  Prose  Works      219 

ence  kept  their  seats  and  every  single  soul  of  them 
was  burnt  to  death.  Thus  we  may  see,"  added 
Wilde,  ''how  useful  a  thing  presence  of  mind 
really  is." 

Of  course,  he  had  other  stories  in  different  veins, 
and  I  believe  that  all  the  tales  in  'The  Happy 
Prince"  and  "The  House  of  Pomegranates,"  as  well 
as  in  the  volume  which  contains  "Lord  Arthur 
Saville's  Crime,"  were  told  by  Wilde  over  and  over 
again  before  they  were  written ;  just  as  he  told  the 
tale  of  "La  Sainte  Courtisane"  and  the  plots  of  his 
plays  before  they  were  written.  "The  Happy 
Prince"  and  "The  House  of  Pomegranates"  are  not 
without  their  merits  as  fairy  tales  in  the  manner 
of  Hans  Andersen,  but  Wilde  could  not  be  content 
with  the  simplicities  of  his  model,  and  some  of  the 
stories  are  marred  by  the  obliquities  of  the  cynic 
and  the  perverse  mind. 

"Lord  Arthur  Saville's  Crime"  and  the  stories 
printed  with  it  may  be  said  to  represent  Wilde's 
attempt  to  come  up  with  Robert  Louis  Stevenson 
on  the  plane  of  the  New  Arabian  Nights.  For 
my  own  part,  I  do  not  think  that  any  of  them  quite 
"comes  off."  Wilde's  friends  have  been  at  great 
pains  to  dilate  on  their  "exquisite  charm,"  their 
"mordant  humour,"  and  so  forth;  but  they  have 
always  seemed  to  me  to  be  fairly  feeble.     "Lord 


220         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

Arthur  Saville's  Crime''  itself  is  so  over- fantastical 
that  it  becomes  farcical.  "The  Canterville  Ghost/' 
which  Wilde  describes  as  a  hylo-idealistic  romance, 
is  a  feeble  but  unblushing  imitation  of  a  now  for- 
gotten story  called  "Cecilia  de  Noel,"  by  Lane  Fal- 
coner. "The  Sphinx,  Without  a  Secret,"  is  a  very 
stale  and  flat  disappointment;  and  "The  Model 
Millionaire"  is  exactly  the  kind  of  story  for  which 
Tit-Bits  or  Answers  gives  a  guinea  prize  every 
week.  I  should  not  like  the  reader  to  imagine  that 
I  am  dismissing  these  things  airily  or  pooh-poohing 
them  for  the  mere  sake  of  doing  it.  I  have  lately 
read  them  with  care,  and  I  marvel  that  anybody  can 
pretend  that  there  is  a  great  or  dazzling  merit 
about  them. 

I  believe  that  at  the  bottom  of  his  heart  Wilde 
felt  that  his  true  genius  had  found  expression  in 
his  plays.  Being  the  man  he  was,  he  could  not 
refrain  from  praising  his  own  poetry,  his  own 
essays  and  stories,  and  professing  that  they  were 
very  fine  things  indeed;  but  when  he  talked  of 
himself  as  a  supreme  artist,  it  was  the  plays  that 
he  always  had  looming  in  his  mind.  For  his  poetry 
he  had  never  received  any  of  the  critical  rewards 
which  would  have  so  delighted  him.  He  was  never 
hailed  poet  by  the  poets  contemporary  with  him; 
never  admitted  to  that  higher  hierarchy  to  which 


The  Plays  and  Prose  Works      221 

Tennyson,  Swinburne,  Arnold,  Browning  and,  if 
you  like,  even  Rossetti,  felt  and  knew  themselves  to 
belong.  But  his  general  prose  and  some  of  his 
■essays  (paid  for  lavishly  by  Frank  Harris  when  he 
was  editing  The  Fortnightly)  made  a  nine  days' 
sensation,  but  they  brought  him  no  real  credit  or 
reputation ;  neither  did  the  story  books.  It  was  with 
Lady  Windermere's  Fan  that  he  first  got  home,  as 
it  were;  with  results  which,  in  the  way  of  finance 
and  applause,  were  entirely  beyond  his  wildest 
dreams  or  expectation.  Lady  Windermere's  Fan 
was  a  success,  as  successes  went  in  those  days,  and 
it  was  followed  by  other  successes,  culminating  in 
The  Importance  of  being  Earnest,  which  brought 
Wilde  more  money  and  more  appreciation  than  any 
of  them.  Because  the  plays  were  a  success  and 
London  went  to  see  them,  Wilde  allowed  himself 
to  think  that  they  must  be  important  as  literature 
and  that  he  was  a  great  dramatist. 

Sir  Arthur  Pinero  will  probably  not  consider 
himself  too  flattered  when  I  mention  that  Wilde 
bad  the  greatest  possible  admiration  for  his  work, 
and  told  me  that  from  Pinero  and  Dumas  Fils 
lie  had  learnt  all  he  knew  of  stagecraft  and  that 
lie  considered  The  Magistrate  to  be  the  best  of  all 
modern  comedies.  It  is  certain  that  for  the  plays, 
as  for  everything  else  he  did,  Wilde  had  to  model 


222         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

himself  on  somebody,  and  Sir  Arthur  is  fortunate 
or  unfortunate  in  having  been  the  man.  One  has 
only  to  compare  the  constructive  methods  of  the 
two  to  recognise  this.  The  only  difference  between 
them  is  that  Sir  Arthur  Pinero  maintains  an  illusion 
of  strict  sanity  among  his  characters,  whereas 
Wilde  is  not  always  to  be  depended  upon  in  this 
regard.  Besides  which,  there  is  the  further  differ- 
ence that,  while  Pinero  conforms  to  the  established 
code  of  morals  and  makes  his  good  people  good  and 
his  bad  people  bad,  Wilde  has  a  tendency  to  hold  up 
bad  people  for  good  people,  and  drops  out  really 
good  people  altogether.  I  am  going  to  say  this 
much  and  no  more  about  the  plays  as  a  body: 
namely,  that  they  put  Wilde  into  a  secondary  posi- 
tion with  regard  to  Pinero  and  Mr.  Sydney  Grundy. 
His  plays  are  not  literary  or  intellectual  plays,  but 
just  the  conventional  things  which  were  stirring 
in  London  during  Wilde's  period,  with  the  Wilde 
paradox,  irony,  flippancy  and  insincerity  thrown 
in.  I  am  no  frantic  believer  in  the  supreme  gifts 
of  Mr.  George  Bernard  Shaw,  and  I  have  never 
been  able  to  get  up  any  great  enthusiasm  for  the 
sentimentalities  of  Sir  J.  M.  Barrie;  but  it  is  quite 
certain  that  both  these  gentlemen  have  beaten 
Wilde  as  exponents  of  a  drama  which  is  supposed 


The  Plays  and  Prose  Works      223 

to  be  concerned  with  art  and  literature  rather  than 
with  the  stage  and  the  box-office. 

Wilde  will  not  last  as  a  dramatist,  whether  behind 
the  footlights  or  in  the  closet.  His  plays  have  been 
revived  occasionally,  and  the  glitter  has  been  found 
in  a  great  measure  to  have  died  out  of  them ;  while 
as  plays  for  reading  they  w^ould  not  be  read  at  all 
if  they  bore  any  other  name  but  Wilde's.  I  will  ask 
any  unbiassed  person  to  peruse  Lady  Windermere's 
Fan  or,  if  you  like,  An  Ideal  Husband  and  The  Im- 
portance of  being  Earnest ^  and  tell  me  if  here  is 
great  work.  I  do  not  wish  to  load  these  pages  with 
quotations  from  books  which  are  readily  obtainable ; 
but  if  I  were  so  disposed  I  could  set  forth  twaddling 
and  mock-heroic  dialogue  and  feeble  humour  from 
Wilde's  plays  by  the  yard.  There  are  passages  in 
all  the  plays  which  might  have  been  written  by 
a  sentimental  schoolgirl  rather  than  by  an  artist, 
or  by  a  giggling  actor  rather  than  a  wit.  I  shall  not 
say  that  the  plays  failed  of  their  purpose,  which, 
however,  could  have  been  at  best  only  a  temporary 
purpose.  A  man  who  boasted  of  the  intellectual 
superiorities  of  which  Wilde  boasted,  demeaned 
himself  when  he  wrote  them,  and  still  more  hope- 
lessly demeaned  himself  when  he  pretended  to  take 
the  popular  applause  which  followed  for  honest 


224         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

fame.  I  was  constantly  with  him,  as  I  have  shown^ 
when  he  wrote  the  most  successful  of  them.  In  a 
careless  way  I  aided  and  abetted  him  in  their  pro- 
duction, but  it  never  entered  my  mind  that  they 
were  either  fine  drama  or  fine  literature.  And 
whatever  Wilde  himself  might  have  thought  about 
them,  he  certainly  would  not  have  contended  that 
they  were  wonderful  works  or  genius  before  me.  I 
do  not  wish  to  suggest  that  a  man  of  genius  is  not 
entitled  to  condescend  to  the  demands  of  the  popular 
stage  in  certain  circumstances,  such  as  need  of 
money  or  a  desire  to  show  that  genius  can  do  com- 
mon things  quite  as  capably  as  common  people ;  and 
it  is  therefore  that  I  do  not  blame  Wilde  for  writing 
the  prose  plays.  But  it  is  obviously  illogical  and 
idiotic  of  him  to  turn  round  and  profess  that  be- 
cause he  could  tickle  the  popular  fancy  of  his  period^ 
the  work  with  which  he  did  it  is  as  fine  and  as 
worthy  as  anything  in  dramatic  literature.  Nobody 
knew  better  than  he  how  false  and  foolish  and  how 
subversive  of  reason  such  an  assumption  must  be^ 
Wilde's  ''boomsters"  have  gone  further  in  this 
stupid  business  than  even  Wilde  himself  would  have 
gone.  If  we  are  to  believe  what  they  write,  Wilde 
is  the  greatest  dramatist  since  Shakespeare,  and 
beats  Goldsmith,  Congreve,  Sheridan  and  all  the 
rest  of  them  into  a  cocked  hat.    The  cold  truth  is; 


The  Plays  and  Prose  Works      225 

that  he  never  succeeded  in  rivalling  Sir  Arthur 
Pinero  or  Mr.  Jones,  and  that  he  has  been  out- 
distanced by  his  own  pupil,  Mr.  George  Bernard 
Shaw. 


CHAPTER  XVIII 

FOR  POSTERITY 

THERE  is  a  critical  shibboleth  to  the  effect 
that  no  man  can  rightly  judge  his  contem- 
poraries. The  true  inwardness  of  this  very 
comforting  idea  lies  in  its  extreme  utility  where 
persons  of  mediocre  intellect  are  concerned.  Per- 
sons who  write  feeble  poetry  and  silly  plays,  not  to 
mention  offensive  fiction,  always  pretend  to  put 
their  hopes  in  posterity.  My  contention  is  that 
posterity  is  not  likely  to  be  much  more  imbecile  than 
the  contemporary  world,  and  that  the  foolish  hopes 
of  vain  and  incompetent  people  are  consequently 
ill-founded.  A  feeble  poem  is  not  to  be  strength- 
ened by  the  mere  process  of  time  any  more  than  a 
piece  of  strong  work  is  likely  to  be  weakened  or 
degraded.  It  is  singular  to  note,  too,  that  people 
seldom  appeal  to  posterity  when  they  are  being  ap- 
plauded. For  a  man  with  bouquets  in  his  hand  and 
the  laurel  on  his  brow  posterity  does  not  exist.  On 
the  other  hand,  for  all  of  us,  whoever  we  may  be, 

posterity  has  its  use,  and,  though  I  do  not  think  that 

226 


For  Posterity  227 

these  uses  are  important  to  us,  they  nevertheless 
exist.  By  way,  therefore,  of  a  sporting  offer,  as  it 
were,  I  shall  reach  a  hand  through  time  and  ask 
posterity  to  do  me  a  favour,  which  is  this :  when  I 
have  been  dead  fifty  years  let  some  critic  of  parts 
put  on  one  side  Wilde's  published  work,  the  present 
work  and  my  own  poems  and  verses;  and  let  him 
put  on  the  other  side  all  the  biographies  of  Wilde 
he  can  lay  his  hand  on,  together  with  the  parts 
of  "De  Profundis"  which  are  now  lying  in  the 
British  Museum;  and  when  he  has  examined  care- 
fully and  critically  these  two  bundles  of  material, 
let  him  say  without  fear  or  favour  who  has  drawn 
the  true  picture — Lord  Alfred  Douglas  or  Messrs. 
Ross,  Ransome,  Sherard  and  Harris. 

I  shall  sink  or  swim  on  some  such  decision,  and 
I  am  content.  At  the  present  moment  it  is  to  the 
interest  of  everybody  directly  concerned  that  the 
Wilde  myth  should  continue  to  exist.  It  is  excellent 
for  Wilde's  publishers,  excellent  for  the  printing, 
paper  and  bookbinding  trades,  and  excellent  for 
those  critics  and  editors  who  are  best  known  by 
their  labours  in  connection  with  Wilde.  For  them 
it  is  merely  a  matter  of  trade,  and  innocent  enough. 
It  is  also  excellent  for  those  depraved  persons  who 
take  Wilde  as  their  moral  guide  and  who  profess 
to    believe — and,    possibly,    do    believe— that    the 


228         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

viciousness  for  which  Wilde  suffered  imprisonment 
is  a  species  of  superior  virtue;  and  it  is  also  excel- 
lent for  that  vast  multitude  of  persons  who,  while 
they  may  have  no  particular  sympathy  with  Wilde's 
depravities,  are,  nevertheless,  of  oblique  mind  and 
cynically  immoral  intellect.  In  the  aggregate  these 
people  are  very  strong,  much  stronger  than  the  easy- 
going, uncorrupted  masses  of  humanity  imagine. 
They  are  so  strong  in  England  and  so  numerous 
that  it  is  profitable  to  flood  the  country  with  Wilde's 
works  at  a  shilling.  They  are  so  strong  in  the 
press  that  it  is  next  door  to  impossible  to  find  a 
critical  review  or  newspaper  wherein  Wilde's  name 
is  not  mentioned,  from  time  to  time,  with  bated 
breath  and  whispered  humbleness.  They  are  so 
strong  socially  that  the  Wilde  evangelists  are  wel- 
comed in  the  highest  political  and  social  circles. 
And  they  are  so  insidious  that  they  have  succeeded 
in  upsetting  the  usually  calm  judgment  of  the  Bench 
and  the  Bar.  We  have  seen  Mr.  F.  E.  Smith,  k.c, 
weeping  crocodile  tears  over  Wilde's  memory  and 
expressing  the  hope  that  his  sins  were  forgotten  and 
that  his  genius  might  be  left  to  blaze  brilliantly  in 
all  men's  sight  without  so  much  as  a  rude  air  to 
disturb  it. 

There  are  two  interests,  however,  which  these 
bands  of  champions  habitually  ignore.    One  is  the 


m 

O    PM 

H 


For  Posterity  229 

interest  of  letters  and  the  other  is  the  interest  of 
the  pubHc  morals.  It  is  not  in  the  interest  of  letters 
that  any  writer,  however  capable,  should  be  given 
honour  and  adulation  beyond  his  merits.  When 
Wilde  is  set  up  for  the  supreme  artist  all  other 
artists  in  all  time  are  degraded  thereby;  when 
Wilde  is  set  up  for  a  poet  of  the  first  order,  all  other 
poets  suffer  damage  by  comparison;  and  when 
Wilde  is  set  up  for  a  moralist,  there  is  just  a  lunatic, 
anarchist  end  of  morals.  The  question  of  the  pub- 
lic interest  is  largely  bound  up  in  these  things.  But 
outside  of  them  there  are  ever  graver  matters.  I 
maintain  that  even  if  we  dismiss  Wilde's  private 
shamefulness  from  the  account,  he  is  still  to  be  con- 
demned by  reason  of  the  nature  and  intention  of  his 


writmgs. 


As  I  shall  show  in  the  chapter  on  "Dorian  Gray," 
Wilde  himself  admitted  that  ''Dorian  Gray''  was  a 
poisonous  book.  In  its  own  way  'The  Sphinx"  is 
just  as  poisonous,  and  so  are  many  passages  in  the 
essays  which  go  to  make  up  "Intentions."  In  the 
plays  we  find  him  continually  flying  in  the  face  of 
the  rules  of  conduct  which  make  life  possible  and 
keep  it  sweet.  He  preaches  always  (flatly  or  by 
innuendo)  that  vice  is  at  least  more  interesting  than 
virtue;  that  insincerity  is  better  and  more  to  be  de- 
sired than  truth;  that  cynical  carelessness  and  in- 


230         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

difference  are  more  comely  than  kind  feeling  and 
altruism;  and  that  the  whole  end  and  aim  of  life 
is  to  eat  delicately,  sleep  softly  and  be  as  wicked 
and  depraved  as  you  like,  provided  that  you  are 
wicked  and  depraved  in  a  graceful  manner.  I  find 
myself  utterly  incapable  of  acquiescing  in  such  a 
scandalous  view  of  the  reasons  and  purposes  of 
human  existence,  and  I  say  my  say  accordingly. 
It  would  have  been  easier  and  more  profitable  for 
me  to  have  made  a  book  about  Wilde  which  would 
not  have  appeared  harsh  or  severe  or  in  any  way 
offensive  to  the  factions  which  ring  him  round. 
The  breaking  up  of  other  people's  gods,  even  though 
they  happen  to  be  gods  of  clay,  is  not  a  job  for  a 
man  of  a  pacific  turn  of  mind.  Wilde  knew  that 
some  day  a  true  biographical  and  critical  account 
of  himself  would  have  to  be  written  and,  doubtless, 
on  the  principle  of  getting  one's  blow  in  first,  he  put 
it  on  record  that  it  is  always  Judas  who  is  the  biog- 
rapher. The  late  lamented  Charles  Peace  was  of 
the  same  opinion,  and  so,  doubtless,  were  many 
other  unpleasant  and  somewhat  exploded  persons, 
accounts  of  whose  lives  have  still  to  be  written.  It 
is  conceivable  that  there  are  circumstances  in  which 
honest  biography  is  of  slight  consequence.  In  point 
of  fact,  all  biography  that  matters  is  largely  a  sort 
of  exegesis  and  commentary  on  the  life  work  of  its 


For  Posterity  231 

subject.  The  biographies  of  persons  who  have  done 
nothing  are,  in  the  nature  of  things,  unprofitable. 
Wilde  made  a  stir  in  the  world,  and  his  drum- 
beaters  and  fuglemen  have  made  an  even  greater 
stir  on  his  behalf.  It  is  right  and  proper  that  while 
the  noise  is  still  in  the  air  we  should  endeavour  to 
discover  its  real  meaning  and  to  get  sight  of  the  in- 
struments by  which  it  is  produced. 


CHAPTER  XIX 

THE  BRITISH  MUSEUM  AND  "dE  PROFUNDIS" 

I  HAVE  already  shown  that  it  was  not  until 
the  Ransome  trial  was  well  on  the  way  that 
I  had  any  idea  of  the  existence  of  the  unpub- 
lished parts  of  ''De  Profundis''  or  that  the  whole 
manuscript  had  originally  been  couched  in  the  form 
of  a  letter  to  me.  As  soon  as  I  heard  rumours  of 
these  facts  I  communicated  with  Mr.  Robert  Ross, 
and  was  informed  definitely  of  them  by  Messrs. 
Lewis  and  Lewis,  who,  in  their  letter  to  me,  asserted 
that  "I  must  have  known''  of  the  existence  of  the 
manuscript  and  that  my  name  was  omitted  from  the 
published  parts  out  of  ''consideration  for  my  feel- 
ings." It  is  perfectly  obvious  that  there  is  nothing 
in  the  published  parts  of  ''De  Profundis"  to  which 
I  could  take  exception,  nor  should  I  have  been  in  the 
least  degree  injured  if  Mr.  Ross  had  let  it  be  known 
that  the  published  parts  were  addressed  to  me  in- 
stead of  leaving  it  to  be  inferred  that  they  had  been 
addressed  to  him.  It  is  true  that  when  I  had  a  con- 
versation with  him  prior  to  the  publication  of  the 

232 


British  Museum  and'*De  Profundis"  233 

book,  Ross  told  me  that  there  were  certain  refer- 
ences in  it  which  I  might  not  have  Hked,  but  he  also 
told  me  that  these  had  been  expunged,  and  I  under- 
stood that  the  book  was  really  a  letter  addressed  to 
himself.  This  is  as  far  as  my  information  went  up 
to  the  time  of  the  action. 

Before  the  trial  I  obtained,  by  order  of  the  Court, 
discovery  of  the  unpublished  part  of  "De  Pro- 
fundis."  I  handed  the  document  to  Mr.  T.  W.  H. 
Crosland,  who,  after  perusing  it,  insisted  on  reading 
it  to  me  from  the  first  word  to  the  last.  I  gave  him 
answers  then  and  there  on  every  point  he  chose  to 
raise,  and  I  don't  mind  admitting  that  his  examina- 
tion of  me  was  a  good  deal  closer  and  a  good  deal 
keener  than  that  of  Mr.  Campbell,  k.c,  who  cross- 
examined  me  on  behalf  of  Ransome. 

It  was  not  until  we  got  into  Court  that  we  knew 
that  Mr.  Ross  had  been  so  kind  as  to  hand  over 
the  unpublished  parts  of  the  ''De  Profundis"  MS. 
to  the  authorities  of  the  British  Museum  as  a  pres- 
ent to  the  nation  with  the  condition  that  they  were 
to  remain  under  seal  till  1960,  and  that  the  British 
Museum  authorities  had  been  gracious  enough  to 
accept  the  gift.  It  is  not  for  me  to  profess  to  know 
upon  what  principle  the  British  Museum  accepts 
gifts  of  secret  documents.  One  takes  it  that  some- 
body at  the  British  Museum  must  have  taken  the 


234         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

trouble  to  read  the  MS.  before  it  was  accepted  and 
sealed  up,  and  that  unless  the  person  who  perused 
it  was  a  sheer  idiot  he  must  have  perceived  that  it 
contained  much  scurrilous  and  libellous  matter  not 
only  concerning  myself,  but  concerning  the  Dow- 
ager Marchioness  of  Queensberry  and  other  mem- 
bers of  my  family.  Yet  the  MS.  was  accepted  and 
is  now  in  possession  and  control  of  the  officials  at 
the  British  Museum.  With  these  facts  before  us 
we  are  brought  face  to  face  with  an  entirely  new 
and  unprecedented  range  of  possibilities.  I  flatter 
myself  that  when  I  die  any  lengthy  MS.  of  mine 
which  I  might  care  to  write  would  have  some  slight 
value  for  persons  concerned  in  the  collection  of 
holographs  and  similar  material  for  museums.  It 
is  open  to  me,  therefore,  to  sit  down  and  write  a 
villainous  attack  upon  any  eminent  person  with 
whom  I  may  chance  to  be  acquainted  and  to  arrange 
that  my  executor  shall  present  it  to  the  British 
Museum  to  be  treasured  for  the  nation  and  put  to 
such  uses  as  the  British  Museum  may  at  any  time 
deem  to  be  fitting.  How  many  manuscripts  of  this 
nature  may  already  be  lurking  on  the  British 
Museum's  shelves  the  wise  authorities  alone  know. 
Fifty  years  hence  we  may  wake  up  to  a  due  knowl- 
edge of  the  "real"  characters  of  most  of  our  most 
noted  public  men,  written  by  other  eminent  public 


British  Museum  and  "De  Profundis"  235 

men  who  have  had  real  or  imaginary  grievances 
against  them.  It  may  well  be  that  we  shall  have 
the  pleasure  of  reading  Mr.  Lloyd  George's  inside 
opinions  of  Lord  Reading  and  his  brethren,  written 
in  Mr.  Lloyd  George's  own  hand  at  the  National 
Liberal  Club  in  moments  of  irritation  or  depression 
after  the  Marconi  affair.  Possibly  Mr.  Keir  Hardie 
may  have  consigned  to  the  same  safe  and  honour- 
able keeping  some  of  his  extraordinary  opinions 
about  certain  dukes  and  certain  judges ;  and  to  come 
into  other  fields,  Mr.  Clement  K.  Shorter  may  have 
lodged  his  private  and  innermost  view  of  the  char- 
acter and  habits  of  Sir  William  Robertson  NicoU, 
Mr.  Thomas  Hardy,  Miss  Marie  Corelli,  and  heaven 
and  the  British  Museum  alone  know  whom  else  be- 
sides. And  what  a  chance  is  herein  opened  up  for 
Mr.  Frank  Harris !  He  has  known  and  apparently 
loved  Carlyle,  Huxley,  Meredith,  Matthew  Arnold 
and  Oscar  Wilde,  not  to  mention  Lord  Randolph 
Churchill,  Mr.  Asquith,  Mr.  Ben  Tillet  and  other 
notabilities.  He  has  nothing  to  do  but  to  write  what 
he  likes  about  them  and  present  the  result  to  the 
British  Museum,  for  opening  and  publication  in 
that  annus  mirahilis  1960. 

Of  course,  it  is  ridiculous  to  suppose  that  any 
of  the  persons  I  have  mentioned  possess  spleen  and 
impudence  enough  to  degrade  themselves  by  doing 


236         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

anything  of  the  kind.  But  the  fact  remains  that 
the  British  Museum  authorities  are  sitting  at  the 
receipt  of  custom,  with  open  and  itching  palms,  and 
that  in  Wilde's  case  they  have  received,  and,  not 
only  so,  but  have  refused  to  disgorge  when  they 
were  caught  at  it. 

I  quite  admit  that,  having  once  accepted  on  be- 
half of  the  nation  a  relic  of  any  kind,  the  British 
Museum  is  bound  to  be  cautious  about  parting  with 
It  again.  This,  doubtless,  is  the  refuge  behind 
which  the  authorities  take  their  stand;  but  the  real 
point  is  whether  they  were  ever  justified  in  accept- 
ing it  at  all,  and  whether,  in  any  case,  it  was  in  the 
public  interest  that  such  a  manuscript  should  be 
accepted.  In  law,  the  paper  on  which  any  letter  is 
written  belongs  to  the  person  to  whom  it  is  ad- 
dressed. The  "De  Profundis''  manuscript  is  ad- 
dressed to  me,  on  the  face  of  it,  and  I  hold  that  I  have 
a  moral  if  not  a  legal  right  to  its  possession.  But 
leaving  this  aspect  of  the  question  on  one  side,  the 
British  Museum  authorities  will  surely  not  contend 
that  it  is  to  the  interest  of  anybody  in  the  world, 
other  than  those  persons  who  delight  in  scandal, 
backbiting  and  malice,  that  such  a  manuscript 
should  be  preserved.  What  possible  motive  that 
is  worthy  can  be  offered  as  an  excuse  by  these 
people?     Argue  as  they  will,  they  must  perceive 


British  Museum  and  ''De  Profundis"  237 

that  the  manuscript  is  one  which  in  no  conceivable 
circumstances  can  be  considered  to  reflect  anything 
but  discredit  on  its  author.  When  it  is  published — 
and  it  will  be  out  of  copyright  one  day — Oscar 
Wilde  is  finished.  No  reputation,  however  securely 
founded,  can  hope  to  survive  the  moral  debacle 
which  this  manuscript  demonstrates  to  have  taken 
place  in  the  mind  of  Oscar  Wilde.  It  is  said  that 
there  must  be  honour  even  among  thieves.  A  man 
may  do  despicable  things  and  still  retain  a  share  of 
the  respect  of  his  fellow-men.  Murderers  have 
gone  to  their  doom  and  have  yet  compelled  some 
sort  of  respect  from  the  world  in  the  manner  of 
their  doing  it.  As  the  published  reports  of  the 
Ransome  trial  show,  Wilde  has  whined  and  shuffled 
and  protested  and  wept  and  tried  to  shift  his  re- 
sponsibilities to  innocent  shoulders ;  and  the  British 
Museum  is  to  make  a  public  treasure  of  the  record 
of  his  infamy  and  keep  it  for  him  until  such  time 
as  it  may  be  published  without  unpleasant  legal  con- 
sequences. 

For  myself  I  do  not  care  tuppence  about  the 
contents  of  this  manuscript.  I  was  anxious  that 
It  should  be  read  out  word  for  word  in  Court  at 
the  Ransome  trial.  If  this  had  been  done,  and 
the  counsel  for  the  defence  had  dared  to  cross- 
examine  me  on  it  in  detail,  I  should  have  won  my 


238         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

case.  On  the  insistence  of  my  counsel  a  pretence 
was  made  of  reading  it,  but  not  twenty  pages  had 
been  got  through  before  Mr.  Justice  DarHng  inter- 
vened, and  the  reading  of  the  MS.  as  a  whole  was 
discontinued.  Thereafter  only  such  portions  were 
read  as  were  supposed  to  be  greatly  to  my  detri- 
ment. Although  these  passages  were  read,  I  was 
never  so  much  as  asked,  either  by  judge  or  counsel, 
to  say  if  there  was  any  truth  in  them.  Wilde  had 
written  them  in  mad  rage  when  he  was  caged  up  in 
a  squalid  gaol,  a  disgraced  and  whimpering  convict, 
and,  of  course,  they  must  be  true!  The  judge  him- 
self pointed  out  that  prisoners  are  apt  to  slander 
and  unreason,  but  he  did  not  tell  the  jury  that  they 
must  take  no  notice  of  what  had  been  read.  Oscar 
Wilde  had  written  it,  Oscar  Wilde  was  a  man  of 
genius,  and  they  must  form  their  own  conclusions. 
The  veriest  tyro  in  law  will  tell  you  that  such  a  docu- 
ment as  this  is  no  evidence  at  all  and  ought  not  to 
have  been  admitted.  Yet  it  was  admitted  and  parts 
selected  by  the  defence  were  allowed  to  go  to  the 
jury.  I  think  that  common  sense  and  common  jus- 
tice demanded  that  we  should  have  had  all  or  none. 
If  the  British  Museum  authorities  did  not  fully 
appreciate  the  nature  of  the  manuscript  at  the  time 
of  its  acceptance  they  have  had  every  opportunity 
of  making  themselves  conversant  with  its  meaning 


British  Museum  and  "De  Profundis"  239 

and  intention  through  what  took  place  at  the  trial. 
They  must  surely  have  recognised  that  it  is  capable 
of  being  put — and,  indeed,  has  been  put — to  the 
basest  and  most  cowardly  uses,  and  that  it  is,  in 
essence,  of  absolutely  no  other  use.    For  all  that,  it 
is  still  preserved,  as  though  it  were  a  literary  gem 
of  the  first  water  instead  of  something  which  man- 
kind at  large  would  be  quite  willing  to  let  die.    I  am 
in  no  position  to  fight  the  British  Museum  for  the 
possession  of  this  abominable  curiosity.     If  it  had 
come  into  my  hands  at  any  time  prior  to  the  Ran- 
some  trial  it  would  have  been  simply  thrown  on 
the  fire,  not  because  I  am  afraid  of  it  or  because  any 
of  my  family  are  afraid  of  it,  but  because,  when  all 
is  said,  I  should  have  had  too  much  respect  for 
Wilde's  memory  and  too  much  regard  for  letters 
ever  t6  consent  to  its  publication.    But  it  has  never 
been  in  my  hands,  and  it  is  now  no  longer  possible 
for  it  to  be  kept  secretly.     Responsible  persons  at 
the  British  Museum  may  well  be  left  to  their  own 
reflections  upon  the  wisdoms  of  preserving  this 
mummified  libel. 


CHAPTER  XX 

ransome's  "critical  study" 

I  AM  not  going  to  trouble  the  reader  with  an 
account  of  the  "Life  and  Works"  of  Mr. 
Arthur  Ransome,  one  of  whose  claims  to  fame 
lies  in  the  fact  that  he  was  a  defendant  in  the 
Ransome  trial.  His  critical  study  of  Oscar  Wilde 
is  a  lumbering,  apologetic  performance  dedicated 
to  Robert  Ross  and  with  an  evident  regard  for  the 
opinions  of  Ross  even  where  criticism  is  concerned. 
The  passages  in  it  which  I  held  to  be  libellous  upon 
myself  have  been  expunged,  and,  according  to  Ran- 
some, this  was  done  with  a  view  to  sparing  my  feel- 
ings. The  edition  current  among  the  public,  how- 
ever, is  not  published  by  the  original  publishing 
house,  but  by  another  firm,  and  both  this  firm  and 
Mr.  Ransome  will,  doubtless,  be  startled  to  hear  that 
if  they  had  ventured  to  insert  the  passages  of  which 
I  complained  in  the  edition  for  which  they  are  re- 
sponsible I  should  have  immediately  served  writs 
for  libel  upon  them  and  taken  my  chances  of  another 
"evisceration"  in  the  witness-box.     Possibly  Mr. 

240 


Ransome's  '^Critical  Study"      241 

Ransome  had  no  inkling  of  this  when  he  put  his 
wonderfully  magnanimous  note  to  the  new  edition, 
but  his  publishers  are  wise  people. 

Ransome's  "Critical  Study/'  at  a  shilling,  has 
been  planted  on  Smith's  stalls  and  at  all  the  shilling 
bookselling  booths  throughout  the  country,  ever 
since  the  trial,  with  the  name  "Oscar  Wilde"  printed 
large  on  the  dust  cover,  and  the  name  of  "Ransome" 
not  quite  so  large.  I  am  going  to  take  the  edition 
as  it  stands,  because  the  original  edition  was  with- 
drawn by  the  publishers  and  can  only  have  had  a 
very  limited  circulation.  It  deals  with  the  facts  of 
Wilde's  life  in  the  briefest  way,  and  is  devoted 
mainly  to  a  pretentious  discussion  of  Wilde's  writ- 
ings. I  may  best  sum  up  its  critical  announcements 
by  saying  that  they  are  all  of  them  what  Ross  would 
have  liked  them  to  be.  Beginning  with  the  poems, 
Ransome  assures  us  that  "Ravenna"  is  an  admirable 
prize  poem.  He  tells  us  that  Wilde's  early  poems 
are  "rich  in  imitations"  and  full  of  "variations  of 
other  men's  music,"  adding  that  they  are  vari- 
ations to  which  the  personality  of  the  virtuoso  has 
given  "a  certain  uniformity."  "Certain"  is  good,  in 
view  of  the  fact  that  these  poems  are  most  distinctly 
not  uniform  in  any  single  quality  which  appertains 
to  poetry.  Of  Wilde's  apings  of  Milton  he  says: 
"Some  of  those  exercises,  which  are  among  the  most 


242         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

interesting  he  wrote,  suggest  the  new  view  of  the 
morale  of  imitation" ;  and  he  goes  on  to  tell  us  that 
''Wilde  made  himself,  as  it  were,  the  representative 
poet  of  his  period.  People  who  had  heard  of  Rossetti 
and  Swinburne,  but  never  read  them,  were  able  to 
recover  their  self-respect  by  purchasing  Wilde/' 
Was  ever  such  arrant  nonsense  put  before  a  con- 
fiding public,  even  at  a  shilling  ?  Mr.  Ransome  was 
in  swaddling  clothes  when  Wilde's  early  volume 
was  going  through  its  five  editions,  otherwise  he 
would  know  that  for  one  person  who  ''recovered 
his  self-respect"  by  purchasing  Wilde  there  were 
fifty  persons  who  were  purchasing  and  reading 
Swinburne  and  Rossetti  without  worrying  about 
their  self-respect  at  all. 

Mr.  Ransome  is  full  of  admiration  for  the  early 
poems  as  a  body.  He  cannot  deny  that  "the  young 
man's  verse  was  grossly  derivative,"  or  that  Milton, 
Dante,  Marlowe,  Keats,  Browning  and  others  "make 
up  a  goodly  list  of  sufferers  by  this  light-hearted 
corsair's  piracies,"  but  he  asks  the  reader  to  believe 
that  Wilde's  plagiarism  was  a  really  pretty  gift  and 
all  to  the  advantage  of  letters,  and  that  the  poems 
are  to  be  valued  as  the  early  work  of  a  great  man 
and,  for  that  matter,  a  great  poet.  I  should  have 
wished  that  Mr.  Ransome  might  have  given  us  a 
more  explicit  condemnation  of  the  moral  aspect  of 


Ransome's  ''Critical  Study"      243 

'The  Sphinx."  His  final  remark  is  that  "it  is  as 
if  a  man  were  finding  solace  for  his  feverish  hands 
in  the  touch  of  cool,  hard  stones,  and  at  the  same 
time  stimulating  his  fever  by  the  sexual  excitement 
of  contrast  between  the  over-sensitive  and  the 
utterly  insensible" — whatever  this  may  mean. 

On  the  prose  Mr.  Ransome  spreads  his  butter 
very  thick  and,  by  way  of  apology  and  blessing 
for  ''Dorian  Gray,"  he  has  the  following  specious 
paragraphs:  "Perhaps  the  reason  why  it  was  so 
loudly  accused  of  immorality  was  that  in  the  pop- 
ular mind  luxury  and  sin  are  closely  allied,  and  the 
unpardonable  mannerism  that  made  him  preach  in 
a  parable  against  the  one,  did  not  hide  his  whole- 
hearted delight  in  describing  the  other."  .  .  . 
"  'Dorian  Gray,'  for  all  its  faults,  is  such  a  book.  It 
is  unbalanced;  and  that  is  a  fault.  It  is  a  mosaic, 
hurriedly  made  by  a  man  who  reached  out  in  all 
directions  and  took  and  used  in  his  work  whatever 
scrap  of  jasper  or  porphyry  or  broken  flint  was  put 
into  his  hand;  and  that  is  not  a  virtue.  But  in  it 
there  is  an  individual  essence,  a  private  perfume,  a 
colour  whose  secret  has  been  lost.  There  are  moods 
whose  consciousness  that  essence,  perfume,  colour 
is  needed  to  intensify." 

And  all  this — mind  you — of  a  book  which  Wilde 
himself  called  "poisonous,"  and  which  Mr.  Ran- 


244         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

some's  own  publishers,  Messrs.  Methuen,  declined 
to  include  at  any  price  in  their  various  editions  of 
Wilde's  works.  There  is  a  great  deal  to  pretty 
much  the  same  effect  about  "Intentions"  and  the 
plays.  Everything  that  Wilde  has  done  is  wonder- 
ful from  the  Ransome  point  of  view,  and  his  liter- 
ary faults  and  failings  are  beautifully  explained 
away  or  made  the  occasion  for  the  handing  up  of 
bouquets,  until  we  come  right  down  to  the  appended 
somewhat  mild  reproof :  "In  1889,  before  the  malefi- 
cent flood  of  gold  was  poured  upon  him,  he  had 
become  accustomed  to  indulge  the  vice  that,  openly 
alluded  to  in  the  days  and  verses  of  'Catullus/  is 
generally  abhorred  and  hidden  in  our  own." 

I  have  previously  shown  that  Ransome  goes  out 
of  his  way  in  another  place  to  indicate  that  Wilde's 
best  work  was  done  during  the  period  when  he  was 
"an  habitual  devotee"  to  the  vice  in  question,  and 
he  is  not  content  even  with  this  subtle  hint,  but 
goes  on  to  suggest  that  Wilde's  knowledge  of  his 
own  infamy  may  have  induced  in  him  "a  height- 
ened ardour  of  production."  I  am  aware  that  the 
impropriety  of  this  sort  of  criticism  can  be  readily 
explained  away  on  the  ground  that  it  is  honest  or 
scientific;  but  the  fact  remains  that  such  criticism 
must  convey  some  vague  suggestion  that  the  literary 
result — in  Wilde's  case,  at  least — was  an  excuse  for 


Ransome's  "Critical  Study''      245 

the  vice.  Such  an  impression  should  not  be  de- 
rivable from  what  professes  to  be  a  ''critical  study" 
of  literary  work. 

It  is  the  custom  of  all  persons  who  wish  to  defend 
dubious  or  immoral  publications,  such  as  I  judge 
some  of  Wilde's  works  to  be,  to  assert  that  the  same 
thing  is  done  in  France — which  country  they  assert 
to  be  the  Mother  of  all  the  Arts — and  that  nobody 
complains  and  no  harm  has  accrued.  If  this  were 
true  of  the  French  or  any  other  people  I  do  not  know 
that  it  would  be  good  argument;  but,  as  a  matter 
of  fact,  it  is  not  true.  Frenchmen  have  undoubt- 
edly been  the  greatest  sinners  in  the  composition 
of  undesirable  books,  and  that  they  are  beginning 
to  reap  what  they  have  sown  is  quite  evident  from 
the  condition  of  French  public  morals  to-day. 
France  admits  that  the  greatest  of  her  social  prob- 
lems at  the  moment  lies  in  the  utterly  vicious  and 
decadent  tendencies  of  French  youth,  particularly 
of  the  lower  and  middle  classes.  But  Frenchmen 
are  beginning  to  perceive  that  just  as  the  apache 
and  the  adolescent  criminal  are  the  direct  outcome 
of  the  neglect  of  religious  and  moral  teaching  in 
the  French  national  schools,  so  the  unsavoury  in- 
tellectual art-mongers  and  Wilde-worshippers  Vv^ho 
are  so  thick  upon  the  ground  in  middle-class  French 
society  owe  themselves,  in  the  m.ain,  to  the  per- 


246         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

nicious  literature  upon  which  the  French  law  places 
no  check.  It  may  be  useful  to  remember  here  that 
even  in  that  great  and  glorious  centre  of  artistic 
freedom — Paris — the  authorities  declined  to  allow 
the  proposed  monument  to  be  erected  over  Wilde's 
grave  in  Pere  la  Chaise  until  certain  modifications 
had  been  made  in  the  work.  It  was  a  bitter  blow 
to  some  of  the  Wilde  faction,  but  the  authorities  of 
Paris  were  inexorable,  and  those  responsible  for  the 
monument  learned  a  lesson  that  they  could  not 
do  as  they  liked,  even  in  France.  I  do  not  say 
that  Mr.  Ransome  has  anything  to  do  with  this, 
but  I  do  say  that  anybody  who,  by  so  much  as  a 
word  or  a  phrase,  minimises  Wilde's  vices  or  vicious 
writing  in  the  name  of  Art  is  not  sufficiently  alive 
to  the  danger  of  one  of  the  most  scandalous  move- 
ments that  has  ever  excited  and  betrayed  mankind. 


MONUMENT    ERECTED    OVER    OSCAR    WILDES    GRAVE, 
PERE    LA    CHAISE,    PARIS 


I  CHAPTER  XXI  ] 

MY  ACTIONS   FOR   LIBEL 

THE  number  of  writs  which  I  have  had  from 
time  to  time  to  issue  over  the  Wilde  affair 
is  past  my  count.  If  I  had  invoked  the  law 
on  every  occasion  upon  which  I  have  been  Hbelled 
over  it,  I  suppose  that  the  fees  for  writs  alone  would 
have  run  into  hundreds  of  pounds.  For  some  years 
I  allowed  people  to  say  whatever  they  might  choose 
to  say  about  me  without  lifting  a  finger  against  them. 
I  believed  in  Wilde,  who  was  my  friend :  I  believed 
in  his  genius  and  I  had  an  exaggerated  opinion 
about  the  value  of  some  of  his  writings.  It  seemed 
to  me  that  time  would  set  me  right;  and  it  seemed 
to  me  important,  both  for  Wilde's  sake  and  the  sake 
of  letters,  that  I  should  avoid,  so  far  as  was  pos- 
sible, stirring  up  the  mud  which  I  knew  lay  at  the 
bottom  of  his  life.  By  the  time  Wilde  came  out  of 
prison  I  formed  a  sort  of  habit  of  taking  no  notice 
whatever  of  either  his  or  my  detractors.  After  his 
death  I  let  everybody  who  had  known  him  rush  into 
print  about  him  without  offering  the  slightest  con- 

247 


248         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

tribution  to  the  discussion.  Sherard  produced  two 
books  purporting  to  be  biographies  of  Wilde.  Other 
books  on  Wilde  have  been  written  by  various  hands ; 
Mr.  Ingleby  has  written  a  life,  and  I  believe  biog- 
raphies have  been  published  in  America.  I  can 
honestly  say,  however,  that  I  have  not  troubled 
even  to  read  any  of  these  works.  Though  I  have 
quoted  from  Sherard  in  the  present  volume,  I  have 
not  read  either  of  his  books  through.  Ingleby's 
book  I  have  glanced  at  and  Ransome's  ''Critical 
Study"  I  read  through  for  the  first  time  in  July  of 
last  year.  My  opinions  as  to  the  importance  of 
Wilde's  writings  began  to  change  as  my  reading 
extended  and  my  mind  took  hold  of  serious  things. 
A  man's  critical  judgment  is  not  at  its  best  at 
twenty-eight,  especially  in  regard  to  the  artistic 
productions  of  his  intimates.  Even  when  we  were 
together  I  had  told  Wilde  over  and  over  again  that 
he  overrated  himself  and  that  he  was  not  by  any 
means  the  great  man  he  believed  himself  to  be.  To 
give  him  his  due,  he  agreed  with  me.  Nevertheless, 
after  his  death  I  held  his  memory  as  a  friend  and, 
if  you  like,  even  as  a  literary  figure,  in  such  regard 
that  I  never  so  much  as  dreamed  of  saying  or  writ- 
ing anything  which  would  be  likely  to  injure  him. 
We  had  had  our  differences.  I  knew  that  he  had 
written  me  one  angry  letter  in  prison  and  I  knew  that 


My  Actions  for  Libel  249 

for  reasons  of  their  own  his  intimates  hated  me;  but 
he  had  apologised  to  me  for  his  anger  and  admitted 
that  it  was  unrighteous  and  ill-founded.  I  did 
everything  that  a  man  could  do  to  succour  and  help 
him  and  make  life  possible  for  him  after  he  left 
prison;  and  I  was  unremitting  in  kindness  to  him 
right  down  to  the  time  of  his  death.  He,  for  his 
part,  seemed  to  be  most  kindly  and  affectionately 
disposed  towards  me  and,  for  aught  I  knew  to  the 
contrary,  would  gladly  have  done  for  me  what  I 
gladly  did  for  him  if  our  positions  had  been  re- 
versed. 

This  thing  is  certain:  that,  during  the  whole  of 
our  close  intimacy  in  Naples  and  Paris,  subsequent 
to  his  downfall,  he  never  once  said  or  even  hinted 
to  me  that  he  had  anything  to  blame  me  for,  or  that, 
whether  as  regards  finance  or  any  other  matters, 
I  had  treated  him  otherwise  than  generously  and 
as  one  friend  should  treat  another.  He  was  a  clever 
man  and,  in  his  way,  a  singularly  astute  man,  but  I 
never  imagined  that  he  was  either  clever  or  astute 
enough  to  keep  up  a  show  of  affectionate  friendship 
for  a  man  whom  he  hated  during  the  years  that 
elapsed  between  his  leaving  Berneval  and  his  death. 
At  the  last  he  drank  a  great  deal  more  than  was 
good  for  him,  and  when  alcohol  began  to  have  a 
power  over  him  and  make  him  drunk,  the  wine  was 


250         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

in  and  the  wit  was  out  in  Oscar  Wilde's  case  just 
as  in  any  other  man's.  If  he  had  cherished  resent- 
ments against  me  and  had  succeeded  in  hiding  them 
when  he  was  sober,  I  should  have  thought  he  would 
have  given  me  an  inkling  of  them  when  he  was 
drunk,  but  he  never  did.  Yet  all  the  time  the  manu- 
script of  "De  Profundis''  was  in  existence,  and  Mr. 
Ross  held  his  instructions  to  publish  it. 

Now,  when  I  found  in  a  book — which  was  ob- 
viously intended  to  be  the  apotheosis  of  Wilde,  but 
was  dedicated  to  Ross,  and  which  claimed  to  put 
forth  the  major  facts  of  Wilde's  life  on  the  author- 
ity of  Ross  as  to  biographical  details — statements 
to  the  effect  that  I  had  been  in  some  way  responsible 
for  his  public  obloquy,  and  that  I  basely  deserted 
him  when  his  money  was  spent,  I  cannot  see  that 
there  was  any  possible  course  open  to  me  but  to  have 
the  matter  threshed  out  in  a  court  of  law.  I  ac- 
cordingly issued  writs  upon  the  whole  of  the  parties 
who  were  legally  concerned:  that  is  to  say,  on  the 
author,  the  publisher,  the  printers,  and  a  represen- 
tative firm  of  distributors.  The  printers  apologised 
and  the  publisher  withdrew  the  book  from  circula- 
tion, and  they  were  allowed  to  drop  out  of  the  action. 
The  'Times  Book  Club"  put  in  a  defence  on  tech- 
nical grounds,  and  Ransome,  for  his  part,  put  in  a 
plea  of  justification.     That  plea  could  never  have 


My  Actions  for  Libel  251 

been  framed  without  the  assistance  and  co-opera- 
tion of  Ross.  I  knew  perfectly  well  what  it  would, 
in  all  probability,  contain  before  ever  I  saw  it.  It 
was  never  really  put  to  the  jury.  Recourse  was  had 
to  other  measures.  Ross  was  in  possession  of  a  few 
old  letters  of  mine;  the  British  Museum  had  the 
unpublished  parts  of  "De  Profundis";  Truth  had 
the  letters  which  I  had  addressed  to  Labouchere, 
and  Messrs.  Russell — a  firm  of  solicitors  of  which 
the  Honourable  Charles  Russell  is  the  principal — 
produced — I  presume  under  subpoena — the  idiot 
letter  from  Wilde  to  myself  which  my  father  pro- 
duced at  Wilde's  trial  at  the  Old  Bailey.  Of  my 
letters  to  Wilde,  Ross  and  Labouchere  there  is, 
since  they  were  not  in  the  defendants'  possession, 
no  mention  whatever  in  the  defendants'  affidavit  of 
documents,  and  consequently  I  had  no  warning  of 
them. 

Of  the  "De  Profundis"  manuscript  I  was  given 
due  notice  and,  of  course,  I  knew  that  Wilde's 
own  letter — which  is  a  letter  which  reflects  discredit 
on  Wilde  rather  than  on  anybody  else — would  be 
sure  to  turn  up.  So  that  my  letters  to  Wilde  and 
Ross  and  the  letters  to  Truth — the  former  sixteen 
years  old  and  the  latter  eighteen  or  twenty  years 
old — were  sprung  on  me  as  I  stood  in  the  witness- 
box.     They  proved  absolutely  nothing,  but  it  was 


252         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

natural  that  they  should  make  prejudice;  and  I  com- 
plain, not  that  they  were  produced,  but  that  they 
were  produced  without  my  being  given  an  oppor- 
tunity of  perusing  them  and  calling  to  mind  the 
circumstances  in  which  they  were  written.  I  said 
in  the  witness-box  what  I  sincerely  felt  and  feel — 
namely :  that  I  am  ashamed  of  having  written  them ; 
but  I  will  say  here  and  now  what  I  tried  to  say  then, 
which  is  that  the  other  side  ought  to  be  much  more 
ashamed  of  having  produced  them.  What  the  de- 
fence really  did  in  effect  was  to  say:  "If  you  didn't 
ruin  Wilde  and  desert  him  because  he  had  no  more 
money  to  spend  on  you,  you  did  something  else 
which  justifies  us  in  saying  anything  we  like  about 
you."  In  point  of  fact,  this  is  always  what  happens 
where  actions  for  libel  are  concerned.  You  libel  a 
man  in  a  most  cruel  and  vicious  way,  and  if  he  takes 
an  action  against  you  you  go  to  court  and  libel  him 
still  further.  Mr.  Ransome  got  his  verdict  and, 
though  I  would  have  appealed  against  it  if  I  had 
possessed  the  means,  he  is  fully  entitled  to  it  in  law. 
He  is  entitled  to  go  on  saying  that  I  ruined  Wilde, 
or  that  I  lived  on  Wilde,  till  he  is  black  in  the  face 
if  he  can  get  anybody  to  print  and  stand  the  racket 
of  it.  But  who  will  believe  him?  Even  with  the 
jury's  verdict  to  give  it  sanction,  the  thing  is  too 
preposterous  for  words.     The  Ransome  affair  had 


My  Actions  for  Libel  253 

made  no  particular  difference  to  me ;  but  what  has  it 
done  for  Wilde  ?  Here  were  these  people  with  two 
short  paragraphs  which  had  nothing  to  do  with 
and  could  not  possibly  help  their  book  in  the  least. 
When  I  started  my  action  against  them  I  did  not 
ask  for  damages  and  should  have  been  content  with 
a  withdrawal  of  the  paragraphs,  and,  in  the  long  run, 
they  have  had  to  be  withdrawn.  If  this  had  been 
done  before  the  trial  I  should  never  have  known  of 
the  existence  of  the  unpublished  parts  of  "De  Pro- 
fundis''  and  the  public  would  never  have  known  of 
them  till  1960.  The  present  book  would  not  have 
been  written  and  the  Wilde  myth  would  have  gone 
merrily  on  its  way  rejoicing,  until  it  was  exploded 
by  process  of  time.  So  that  clearly  Wilde  profits 
nothing,  but,  on  the  whole,  loses  disastrously  and 
perhaps  prematurely,  and  his  tumble  has  been 
brought  about  by  the  very  persons  who  profess  to 
be  his  most  devoted  and  zealous  friends.  Knowing 
what  they  must  have  known,  and  particularly  know- 
ing that  I  had  not  asked  for  damages,  they  would 
have  taken  good  care  that  no  action  took  place  if 
they  had  sufficiently  valued  Wilde.  They  are  fifteen 
hundred  pounds  out  of  pocket,  and  the  radiant 
picture  of  Oscar  Wilde,  which  they  had  been  at 
pains  to  limn,  can  be  radiant  no  more.  Even  Mr. 
Justice  Darling  and  Mr.  F.  E.  Smith  cannot  save 


254         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

it  in  its  pristine  beauty.  The  former  was  kind 
enough  to  explain  to  a  crowded  court  that  Lord 
Alfred  Douglas  *'might"  have  achieved  some  suc- 
cess in  letters  if  he  had  put  his  talents  to  assiduous 
use,  while  the  latter  said  that  Lord  Alfred  Douglas 
had,  in  some  way  which  was  not  explained,  outraged 
every  tradition  of  his  class.  Mr.  Justice  Darling 
forgot  that  I  am  still  the  possessor  of  a  pen  far 
more  able  than  his  own,  and  Mr.  F.  E.  Smith  forgot 
that,  unlike  himself,  I  belong  to  a  class  which  takes 
no  stock  in  cant  and  is  not  to  be  put  down  by  windy 
rhetoric;  a  class,  too,  which  does  not  look  to  Mr. 
Horatio  Bottomley  for  a  push  into  prominence. 


CHAPTER  XXII 
"the  picture  of  dorian  gray'* 

WILDE  had  written  and  published  "The 
Picture  of  Dorian  Gray"  two  years  be- 
fore I  knew  him.  At  the  time  of  its 
appearance  in  Lippincott's  Magazine  I  was  an 
undergraduate  at  Oxford  and,  so  far  as  I  know, 
neither  Wilde  nor  myself  had  ever  set  eyes  on  one 
another.  I  mention  this  because  it  has  been  pre- 
tended that  Wilde  took  me  for  the  model  for  one 
of  his  beastly  characters.  Dates  are  pretty  stubborn 
things,  however,  and  there  can  be  no  doubt  what- 
ever that  "The  Picture  of  Dorian  Gray"  was  pub- 
lished in  1890.  Not  only  so,  but,  by  the  time  I  came 
to  know  Wilde,  the  hubbub  which  the  story  had 
first  created  had  altogether  died  away ;  and  as  I  did 
not  read  the  book  with  any  sort  of  care  or  critical 
intention  till  years  afterwards,  it  never  entered  into 
my  mind  that  it  expressed  the  peculiar  views  of  life 
which  it  is  said  to  illustrate.  Wilde  talked  about 
the  book  sometimes  as  a  highly  moral  work  which 
had  been  hopelessly  misunderstood  by  the  critics, 

255 


256         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

and  he  gave  me  a  copy  of  it  in  which,  as  was  his 
custom,  he  inscribed  his  name;  and  I  did  not  read 
the  book  again  until  the  time  of  my  father's  action 
against  Wilde.  Even  then  I  did  not  read  it  closely 
or  with  any  grave  attention.  I  took  it  for  granted 
for  what  Wilde  says  it  was — namely:  a  work  of 
art  with  an  excellent  moral;  and  I  do  not  wish  to 
say  now  that  it  is  not  a  work  of  art  or  that  it  does 
not  point  a  very  splendid  moral  for  morally  disposed 
people.  It  has  been  reviewed  as  such  in  more  than 
one  important  religious  paper.  At  the  time  when 
I  was  editing  The  Academy  I  blamed  Messrs.  Meth- 
uen  for  not  having  the  pluck  to  include  the  book  in 
their  editions  of  Wilde's  works.  It  seems  to  me 
preposterous  that  if  a  book  can  be  sold  openly  at 
any  English  bookshop  it  should  be  refused  inclusion 
among  the  author's  works  by  his  own  publishers. 
Since  I  made  my  protest  on  this  matter,  however, 
the  whole  question  of  Wilde  and  his  books  has 
undergone  a  marked  and,  to  my  mind,  a  most  dan- 
gerous change.  I  quite  anticipated  that  the  day 
would  arrive  when  Wilde's  disgrace  might,  in  a 
sense,  be  dissociated  from  his  writings.  I  looked 
to  time  and  common  sense  to  winnow  out  what  was 
good  in  those  writings  and  reject  what  was  noxious 
or  deleterious.  It  never  occurred  to  me  that  I 
should  live  to  see  Wilde  used  in  the  way  in  which 


n 


The  Picture  of  Dorian  Gray"    257 


he  has  been  used,  and  is  being  used,  to  the  en- 
dangerment  of  letters  and  morals.  We  are  now 
face  to  face  with  this  fact — namely:  that  there 
exists  in  England  as  well  as  in  France,  Germany 
and  Russia,  a  distinct  and  recognisable  Wilde  cult, 
which  has  as  its  creed  that  Wilde  was  one  of  the 
greatest  geniuses  that  ever  lived.  To  this  large 
following,  which  accepts  Wilde's  vices  as  a  sign 
of  genius,  'The  Picture  of  Dorian  Gray"  has  proved 
to  be  a  powerful  weapon.  It  is  a  book  after  their 
own  heart,  and  its  wit  and  the  moral  which  it  points 
— or  does  not  point,  according  as  one  may  take  it — 
enable  these  people  to  employ  it  in  subtle  and  de- 
vious ways.  I  cannot  help  believing  that  Wilde 
must  have  intended  ''Dorian  Gray''  as  a  fleer  at 
morality.  In  effect  he  may  be  said  to  have  laid 
himself  out  to  write  a  sermon  the  interest  of  which 
should  really  depend  on  obscenities.  He  puts  be- 
fore us  one  of  the  vilest  of  human  creatures,  and, 
without  particularising  as  to  the  nature  of  his  vile- 
ness,  brings  him  to  an  infamous  and  therefore 
poetically  just  end ;  but  the  danger  of  the  thing  lies 
in  that,  while  nine  people  out  of  ten  could  not  have 
told  you  at  the  time  of  the  publication  of  the  book 
wherein  the  peculiar  sin  of  "Dorian  Gray"  lay,  quite 
ninety  people  out  of  a  hundred  can  now  tell  you. 
What  was  laughed  at  for  affectation  in  1891  as- 


258         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

sumed  a  sinister  and  altogether  an  abominable 
aspect  as  the  years  went  on  and  the  true  effect  and 
intention  of  Wilde's  work  began  to  make  itself  ap- 
parent. I  am  not  going  into  details,  but  everybody 
knows  what  I  mean. 

It  may  be  interesting  if  I  print  in  this  place  por- 
tions of  a  review  of  the  story  which  appeared  in 
the  St  James'  Gazette  for  June  24th,  1890.  'Time 
was  (it  was  in  the  70's)  when  we  talked  about 
Mr.  Oscar  Wilde;  time  came  (it  was  in  the  '80's) 
when  he  tried  to  write  poetry  and,  more  adventurous, 
we  tried  to  read  it ;  time  is  when  we  had  forgotten 
him — or  only  remembered  him  as  the  late  editor  of 
the  Woman's  World — a  part  for  which  he  was  sin- 
gularly unfitted  if  we  are  to  judge  him  by  the  work 
which  he  has  been  allowed  to  publish  in  Lippincotfs 
Magazine,  and  which  Messrs.  Ward,  Lock  and  Co. 
have  not  been  ashamed  to  circulate  in  Great  Britain. 
Not  being  curious  in  ordure,  and  not  wishing  to 
offend  the  nostrils  of  decent  persons,  we  do  not  pro- 
pose to  analyse  The  Picture  of  Dorian  Gray' — 
that  would  be  to  advertise  the  developments  of  an 
esoteric  prurience.  The  puzzle  is  that  a  young  man 
of  decent  parts  who  enjoyed,  when  he  was  at  Ox- 
ford, the  opportunity  of  associating  with  gentlemen, 
should  put  his  name — such  as  it  is — to  so  stupid 
and  vulgar  a  piece  of  work.     Let  nobody  read  it 


*The  Picture  of  Dorian  Gray''    259 

in  the  hope  of  finding  witty  paradox  or  racy  wicked- 
ness. The  writer  airs  his  cheap  research  among 
the  garbage  of  the  French  decadents  like  any  drivel- 
Hng  pedant,  and  he  bores  you  unmercifully  with  his 
prosy  rigmaroles  about  the  beauty  of  the  body  and 
the  corruption  of  the  soul.  The  grammar  is  better 
than  Ouida's — the  erudition  equal;  but  in  every 
other  respect  we  prefer  the  talented  lady  who  broke 
off  with  pious  aposiopesis  when  she  touched  upon 
the  horrors  which  are  described  in  the  pages  of 
Suetonius  and  Livy — not  to  mention  the  yet  worse 
infamies  believed  by  many  scholars  to  be  accurately 
portrayed  in  the  lost  works  of  Plutarch,  Venus  and 
Nicodemus — especially  Nicodemus. 

"Let  us  take  one  peep  at  the  young  men  in  Mr. 
Oscar  Wilde's  story.  Puppy  No.  1  is  the  painter 
of  a  picture  of  'Dorian  Gray' ;  Puppy  No.  2  is  the 
critic  (a  courtesy  lord,  skilled  in  all  the  knowledge 
of  the  Egyptians  and  weary  of  all  the  sins  and 
pleasures  of  London) ;  Puppy  No.  3  is  the  original, 
cultivated  by  Puppy  No.  1  with  a  romantic  friend- 
ship. The  Puppies  are  all  talking:  Puppy  No.  1 
about  his  heart,  Puppy  No.  2  about  his  sins  and 
pleasures  and  the  pleasures  of  sin,  and  Puppy  No.  3 
about  himself — always  about  himself  and  generally 
about  his  face,  which  is  brainless  and  beautiful. 
The  Puppies  appear  to  fill  up  the  intervals  of  talk 


260         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

by  plucking  daisies  and  playing  with  them,  and 
sometimes  by  drinking  something  with  strawberries 
in  it.  The  youngest  Puppy  is  told  he  is  'charming' ; 
but  he  mustn't  sit  in  the  sun  for  fear  of  spoiling  his 
complexion.  When  he  is  rebuked  for  being  a 
naughty,  wilful  boy  he  makes  a  pretty  moue — 
this  man  of  twenty!  This  is  how  he  is  addressed 
by  the  blase  Puppy  at  their  first  meeting :  'Yes,  Mr. 
Gray,  the  gods  have  been  good  to  you.  But  what 
the  gods  give  they  quickly  take  away.  When  your 
mouth  goes  your  beauty  will  go  with  it,  and  then 
you  will  suddenly  discover  that  there  are  no  tri- 
umphs left  for  you.  .  .  .  Time  is  jealous  of  you 
and  wars  against  your  lilies  and  roses.  You  will 
become  sallow  and  hollow-cheeked  and  dull-eyed. 
You  will  suflfer  horribly.' 

"Why,  bless  our  souls!  haven't  we  read  some- 
thing of  this  kind  somewhere  in  the  classics  ?  Yes, 
of  course  we  have !  But  in  what  recondite  author  ? 
Ah,  yes! — no! — yes!  it  was  in  Horace!  What  an 
advantage  it  is  to  have  received  a  classical  educa- 
tion, and  how  it  will  astonish  the  Yankees.  But  we 
must  not  forget  our  Puppies,  who  have  probably 
occupied  their  time  in  lapping  'something  with 
strawberries  in  it.'  Puppy  No.  1  (the  art  puppy) 
has  been  telling  Puppy  No.  3  (the  dull  puppy)  how 
much  he  admired  him.     What  is  the  answer?     'I 


''The  Picture  of  Dorian  Gray''    261 

am  less  to  you  than  your  ivory  Hermes  or  your 
silver  Fawn.  You  will  like  them  always.  How 
long  will  you  like  me? — till  I  have  my  first  wrinkle, 
I  suppose.  I  know  now  that  when  one  loses  one's 
good  looks,  whatever  they  may  be,  one  loses  every- 
thing. ...  I  am  jealous  of  the  portrait  you  have 
painted  of  me.  Why  should  it  keep  what  I  must 
lose?  Oh,  if  it  was  only  the  other  way!  If  the 
picture  could  only  change  and  I  could  be  always 
what  I  am  now!' 

''No  sooner  said  than  done.  The  picture  does 
change;  the  original  doesn't.  Here  is  a  situation 
for  you!  Theophile  Gautier  could  have  made  it 
romantic — entrancingly  beautiful.  Mr.  Stevenson 
could  have  made  it  convincing,  humorous,  pathetic. 
Mr.  Anstey  could  have  made  it  screamingly  funny. 
It  has  been  reserved  for  Mr.  Oscar  Wilde  to  make 
it  dull  and  nasty.  The  promising  youth  plunges 
into  every  kind  of  mean  depravity,  and  ends  in  being 
cut  by  fast  women  and  vicious  men ;  he  finishes  with 
murder.  .  .  .  And  every  wickedness  or  filthiness 
committed  by  Dorian  Gray  is  faithfully  registered 
upon  his  face  in  the  picture ;  but  his  living  features 
are  undisturbed  and  unmarred  by  his  inward 
vileness.  This  is  the  story  which  Mr.  Oscar  Wilde 
has  tried  to  tell.  A  very  lame  story  it  is  and  very 
lamely  it  is  told. 


262         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

"Why  has  he  told  it?  There  are  two  explana- 
tions ;  and,  so  far  as  we  can  see,  not  more  than  two. 
Not  to  give  pleasure  to  his  readers;  the  thing  is 
too  clumsy,  too  tedious  and — alas  that  we  should 
say  it — too  stupid!  Perhaps  it  was  to  shock  his 
readers  in  order  that  they  might  cry  fie  upon  him 
and  talk  about  him.  Are  we  then  to  suppose  that 
Mr.  Oscar  Wilde  has  yielded  to  the  craving  for  a 
notoriety  which  he  once  earned  by  talking  fiddle- 
faddle  about  other  men's  art,  and  seize  his  only 
chance  of  recalling  it  by  making  himself  obvious  at 
the  cost  of  being  obnoxious  and  by  attracting  the 
notice  which  the  olfactory  sense  cannot  refuse  to 
the  presence  of  certain  self-asserting  organisms? 
That  is  an  uncharitable  hypothesis,  and  we  would 
gladly  abandon  it.  It  may  be  suggested — but  is  it 
more  charitable? — that  he  derives  pleasure  from 
treating  a  subject  merely  because  it  is  disgusting. 
The  phenomenon  is  not  unknown  in  recent  liter- 
ature, and  it  takes  two  forms,  in  appearance  widely 
separate — in  fact,  two  branches  from  the  same  root 
— a  root  which  draws  its  life  from  malodorous 
putrefaction.  One  development  is  found  in  the 
Puritan  prurience  which  produced  Tolstoy's  'Kreut- 
zer  Sonata'  and  Mr.  Stead's  famous  outbursts. 
That  is  odious  enough  and  mischievous  enough,  and 
it  is  rightly  execrated  because  it  is  tainted  with  a 


'•The  Picture  of  Dorian  Gray"    263 

hypocrisy  not  the  less  culpable  because  charitable 
people  may  believe  it  to  be  unconscious.  But  is  it 
more  odious  or  more  mischievous  than  the  frank 
paganism  which  delights  in  dirtiness  and  confesses 
its  delight?  Still,  they  are  both  chips  from  the 
same  block — 'The  Maiden  Tribute  of  Modern 
Babylon'  and  'The  Picture  of  Dorian  Gray' — and 
both  of  them  ought  to  be  chucked  into  the  fire — 
not  so  much  because  they  are  dangerous  and  cor- 
rupt as  because  they  are  incurably  silly,  written  by 
simple  poseurs  (whether  they  call  themselves  puritan 
or  pagan)  who  know  nothing  about  the  life  which 
they  affect  to  have  explored  and  because  they  are 
mere  catchpenny  revelations  of  the  non-existent 
which,  if  they  reveal  anything  at  all,  are  revelations 
only  of  the  singularly  unpleasant  minds  from  which 
they  emerge." 

The  last  paragraph  is  significant  as  bearing  out 
what  I  have  said  with  regard  to  the  difiference  be- 
tween the  public  morals  of  the  time  when  'The 
Picture  of  Dorian  Gray"  was  first  published  and 
the  public  morals  of  to-day.  The  review  as  a  whole 
did  not  please  Wilde,  and  he  wrote  to  the  editor  of 
the  St,  James'  Gazette  to  say  that  he  was  "quite 
incapable  of  understanding  how  any  work  of  art 
can  be  criticised  from  a  moral  standpoint."  This, 
plainly,  was  no  answer  to  the  review,  nor  can  it 


264         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

be  answered  with  reasonable  argument.  A  sim- 
ilarly cutting  article  which  appeared  in  the  Daily 
Chronicle  described  ''Dorian  Gray''  as  ''a  mixture 
of  dullness  and  dirt" — ''a  tale  spawned  from  the 
leprous  literature  of  the  French  decadents'' — ''a 
poisonous  book,  the  atmosphere  of  which  is  heavy 
with  the  mephitic  odours  of  moral  and  spiritual 
putrefaction" — ''a  gloating  study  of  the  mental  and 
physical  corruption  of  a  fresh,  fair  and  golden 
youth."  'There  is  not  a  single  good  and  holy  im- 
pulse of  human  nature,  scarcely  a  fine  feeling  or 
instinct  that  civilisation,  art  and  religion  have  de- 
veloped throughout  the  ages  as  part  of  the  barriers 
between  Humanity  and  Animalism  that  is  not  held 
up  to  ridicule  and  contempt  in  'Dorian  Gray,'  "  con- 
tinued the  Chronicle,  To  which,  and  a  great  deal 
more  of  similarly  scathing  comment,  Wilde  could 
muster  up  no  better  reply  than  to  say :  "My  story  is 
an  essay  on  decorative  art.  It  reacts  against  the 
crude  brutality  of  plain  realism.  It  is  poisonous, 
if  you  like,  but  you  cannot  deny  that  it  is  also  per- 
fect, and  perfection  is  what  we  artists  aim  at." 

Neither  the  St,  James'  Gazette  nor  the  Daily 
Chronicle  could  foresee  that  a  book  which  they  took 
to  be  the  outcome  of  prowlings  and  garbage-hunt- 
ing among  the  French  decadents  would  come  to  be 
the  gospel  and  literary  stand-by  of  a  world-wide 


"The  Picture  of  Dorian  Gray"    265 

cult  of  moral  and  physical  leprosy;  but  the  thing  has 
come  to  pass,  and  "Dorian  Gray"  goes  on  accom- 
plishing its  mission,  unquestioned  by  criticism,  un- 
checked by  authority,  and  belauded  by  every  half- 
baked  youth  who  can  earn  a  precarious  shilling  by 
dabbling  in  ink. 


CHAPTER  XXIII 

LITERATURE  AND  VICE 

WITH  much  more  wisdom  than  appears 
on  the  surface  of  the  remark,  Mr.  Ran- 
some  tells  us  in  the  "Critical  Study" 
that  it  is  ''scarcely  twenty  years  since  Wilde  wrote 
his  books,  and  in  poetry  as  well  as  in  prose  their 
influence  is  already  becoming  so  common  as  not  to 
be  recognised."  This  is  true,  and  true  in  the  worst 
sense.  Every  objectionable  book  that  is  published 
at  a  reasonable  price  increases  the  trend — consid- 
ered impossible  at  one  time  in  this  country,  but  now 
obviously  marked — towards  a  want  of  decency  in 
our  national  literature.  By  a  singular  irony,  the 
criticism  of  the  day  is  largely  in  the  hands  of  Rad- 
icals and  Nonconformists,  many  of  whom,  by  an 
irony  still  more  singular,  are  engaged  in  the  propa- 
gation of  loose  and  pernicious  doctrine.  I  would 
like  to  wager  that  the  present  book  will  be  attacked 
with  the  greatest  fury  in  precisely  the  quarters 
where,  twenty  years  ago,  it  would  have  been  ap- 
plauded.    If  I  wish  to  see  Wilde  and  his  work 

266 


Literature  and  Vice  267 

spoken  of  with  the  greatest  respect  and  the  greatest 
admiration,  I  have  nothing  to  do  but  turn  to  certain 
Radical  or  Nonconformist  sheets,  and  I  shall  be  at 
once  obliged.  I  am  of  opinion  that  certain  novels, 
and  even  certain  magazines  and  reviews,  now  pub- 
lished in  England  would  never  have  existed  at  all 
but  for  Oscar  Wilde.  One  of  the  monthly  reviews 
is  a  particular  offender;  and  the  infection  is  not 
limited  to  one  paper  only.  Nobody  seems  to  be 
shocked  or  distressed  by  the  fact  and  nobody  lifts 
a  voice  or  a  pen  by  way  of  complaint.  The  journals 
I  have  in  my  mind  are,  in  the  main,  respectable  and 
reasonably  cultivated  publications.  They  are  above 
purchase  or  corruption  in  regard  to  their  general 
conduct,  being  owned  by  rich  men  or  syndicates  and 
run  in  some  instances  at  a  loss  or,  at  any  rate,  no 
particular  profit,  and  for  the  good  of  the  political 
interests  they  represent.  They  take  a  high  tone 
with  regard  to  political  and  social  morality.  They 
contain  general  articles,  stories,  sketches  and  so 
forth  which  are  beyond  reproach  both  as  regards 
their  tone  and  literary  qualities.  Yet  when  it  comes 
to  dealing  with  literature  itself  they  may  be  found 
only  too  frequently  on  the  side  of  the  palpably  du- 
bious and  undesirable. 

,  I  have  had  several  years  of  editorial  experience 
of  my  own,  and  out  of  that  experience  I  think  I  can 


268         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

explain  the  phenomenon.  It  simply  amounts  to 
this:  Editors  are  too  busy — or  too  careless — to 
select  their  reviewers  judiciously  and,  when  a  book 
has  been  reviewed,  they  are  too  busy  or  too  careless 
to  examine  the  reviewer's  work  with  a  view  to 
making  sure  that  it  is  free  from  the  current  taints. 
It  is  a  fact  that  the  younger  school  of  critics,  and 
many  of  the  old  ones,  now  base  themselves  on 
Wilde's  dictum  that  a  work  of  art  cannot  be  criti- 
cised from  a  moral  standpoint,  and  that  the  sphere 
of  art  and  the  sphere  of  ethics  are  absolutely  dis- 
tinct and  separate.  If  the  result  were  that  the 
reviewer  contented  himself  with  the  consideration 
of  literary  work  qua  art,  and  in  no  other  relation, 
there  would  perhaps  be  no  great  harm  done;  but 
in  point  of  fact  this  is  seldom  or  never  done,  and 
it  is  next  door  to  impossible  that  it  should  be  done. 
Opinions  and  moral  reflections  insist  on  finding 
their  way  even  into  works  of  art,  and  literary  works 
of  art  are,  by  their  very  nature,  almost  entirely 
made  up  of  them.  In  spite  of  his  own  denial  of  the 
inter-relation  between  art  and  morals,  Wilde  always 
asserted  that  "Dorian  Gray"  had  a  moral — that  is 
to  say,  when  it  suited  him  to  make  the  assertion. 
It  is  obvious  that  any  four  lines  of  serious  verse 
must  have  some  sort  of  a  moral  bearing,  and  so 
every  poem  has  a  moral  and  every  story  has  a  moral 


Literature  and  Vice  269 

and  every  piece  of  writing  has  a  moral — implied, 
even  if  it  be  not  specifically  stated.  Now  the  new 
reviewer  and  all  of  the  old  ones  know  this  as  well 
as  I  do.  They  cannot  divide  art  from  morality, 
and  when  they  pretend  to  do  so  it  will  usually  be 
found  that  they  are  really  condoning,  defending, 
upholding  or  propagating  obvious  immorality.  I 
do  not  wish  it  to  be  supposed  that  the  review  col- 
umns of  English  journals  bristle  with  this  sort  of 
thing;  but  there  can  be  no  doubt  that  it  crops  up 
from  time  to  time  and  with  a  sufficient  frequency 
to  make  it  quite  plain  that  the  press  is  far  more 
easy  and  tolerant  on  the  matter  than  it  has  any 
right  to  be.  Obviously,  letters  is  a  vehicle  which 
is  handier  than  any  other  vehicle  for  the  spread 
of  evil  thinking.  An  improper  picture  is  improper 
on  the  face  of  it,  and  calls  immediate  attention  to 
itself  and  immediate  reproof  from  decent  people. 
Such  pictures  cannot  really  exist  publicly.  An  im- 
proper play  has  to  get  past  the  censor,  and  it  has 
also  to  overcome  the  repugnance  of  persons  who  do 
not  like  openly  to  be  assisting  in  wickedness.  Both 
picture  and  play,  too,  have  to  be,  in  the  nature  of 
things,  either  decent,  or  frankly  and  palpably  in- 
decent. But  in  a  book  you  can  have  dubiety,  and 
you  can  have  patches  of  impropriety  and  indecency 
tucked  away  amid  a  mass  of  inoffensive  and,  it  may 


270         Oscar  Wilde  and  My  elf 

be,  even  excellent  writing.  This  is  particularly  the 
case  with  regard  to  novels  and  poetry,  and  nobody 
with  any  care  for  either  literature  or  the  public  well- 
being  can  help  but  regret  it.  The  only  censorship 
which  can  do  anything  to  stem  the  increasing  tide 
of  looseness  and  license  in  these  regards  is,  obvi- 
ously, criticism.  I  maintain  that  the  criticism  of 
the  day  is — in  a  preponderating  measure,  con- 
sciously or  unconsciously — in  agreement  with  Wilde 
on  these  subjects,  and  the  result  is  plain  for  all  of 
us  to  see.  I  used  to  believe  that  art  is  more  im- 
portant than  conduct.  This  is  a  mistake  which  most 
of  us  are  prone  to  make  when  we  are  young  and 
dazzled  with  the  beauty  and  colour  of  life.  The 
vast  mass  of  mankind,  however,  are  not  concerned 
with  art  as  art  at  all,  but  merely  with  art  in  its 
relation  to  its  personal  effect  upon  themselves.  The 
average  reader,  whether  of  prose  or  verse,  has  little 
or  no  conscious  interest  in  the  art  of  either.  If  he 
had,  many  of  the  moderns  with  enormous  circula- 
tions would  feel  a  very  considerable  draught,  inas- 
much as  they  are  not  artists  and  do  not  pretend  to 
be.  In  view  of  the  general  ability  to  read  and  the 
extraordinary  cheapness  of  books,  it  has  become 
more  than  ever  important  that  literature  should  be 
kept  free  from  viciousness,  prurience  and  improper 
suggestion.     If  criticism  fails  in  its  duty  in  this 


Literature  and  Vice  271 

respect,  the  national  intellect  and  the  national 
morals  will  inevitably  be  debased,  and  the  proper 
purposes  of  art  utterly  destroyed.  It  is  the  fashion 
to  say  that  great  authors  do  not  write  merely  for 
youth  and  young  misses  at  school,  but  it  is  neverthe- 
less a  fact  that  it  is  upon  the  adolescent  of  both 
sexes  that  these  authors  have  to  depend,  in  the 
main,  for  a  hearing  and  for  reputation  and  income. 
In  the  case  of  Wilde,  it  is  to  youth  particularly  that 
he  very  largely  appeals.  Most  persons  of  middle 
life  know  a  great  deal  more  about  the  facts  of 
existence  than  would  admit  them  to  take  Wilde  for 
anything  but  a  flippant  and  unbalanced  writer.  The 
wise  perceive  that  there  is  no  gingerbread  beneath 
his  gilt,  and  they  know  that  even  the  gilt  is  not 
honest  metal.  His  influence  upon  youth  is  un- 
doubted and  obvious,  but  it  is  equally  undoubted  and 
obvious  that  his  influence  is  a  bad  one,  and  the 
sooner  we  acknowledge  the  fact  the  better  it  will 
be  for  Art  and  Letters. 


CHAPTER  XXIV 

CROSLAND  AND  "tHE  FIRST  STONE" 

TO  be  properly  understood  in  this  world  is 
beyond  human  expectation.  That  my  rela- 
tions with  Wilde  have  been  misunderstood 
this  narrative  bears  witness.  Pretty  well  every- 
thing I  have  done  or  said  with  respect  to  him  has 
been  misconstrued  or  misrepresented;  and,  of 
course,  it  was  not  a  matter  of  surprise  to  me  to  find 
that  when  Crosland  published  "The  First  Stone'' 
some  devotees  took  it  for  granted  that  I  had  sub- 
orned him  to  do  it.  Their  rage  knew  no  bounds. 
On  the  appearance  of  the  book,  half  the  editors  in 
London  were  besieged  with  letters  from  adherents 
of  Wilde — whose  identity  was  and  is  entirely  un- 
known to  me — abusing  Crosland  and  explaining 
that  it  was  well  known  that  I  had  instigated  him  to 
write  the  work,  and  paid  for  the  publication.  So 
far  as  I  am  aware,  none  of  these  letters  was  printed 
and,  when  the  writers  of  them  found  that  they  could 
not  get  the  publicity  they  required,  they  took  to 
sending  copies  of  them  to  Crosland  and  myself. 


Crosland  and  'The  First  Stone''   273 

Ultimately  somebody  went  to  the  length  of  print- 
ing a  pamphlet  in  which  both  of  us  were  accused 
of  all  sorts  of  vileness.  This  pamphlet  appeared 
without  the  name  of  its  author  and  without  the 
name  or  address  of  the  printer  and  publisher. 
Those  responsible  for  it  lacked  the  courage  of  their 
opinions,  but  they  had  pluck  enough  to  post  it  out 
under  cover  and  to  say  that  copies  of  it  could  be 
obtained  at  some  address  in  Chelsea.  I  had  en- 
quiries made  at  the  address  given  and  found  that 
it  consisted  of  a  block  of  flats,  but  that  there  was 
nobody  there  who  would  admit  any  knowledge  of 
the  matter.  The  pamphlet  was  called  "The  Writ- 
ing on  the  Floor,"  but  nobody  who  lived  on  any  of 
the  floors  of  these  flats  from  the  basement  up- 
wards, would  own  to  the  slightest  connection  with 
it.  I  mention  these  facts  not  because  I  attach  any 
importance  to  the  pamphlet,  but  because  they  show 
to  what  extraordinary  courses  my  enemies  will  have 
resort  when  their  malice  gets  the  better  of  them. 
They  indicate,  too,  that  there  is  no  limit  to  the 
resources  of  these  people.  The  difficulties  of  ob- 
taining a  printer,  whether  in  London  or  the  prov- 
inces, for  such  statements  as  were  contained  in  'The 
Writing  on  the  Floor''  must  have  been  well-nigh 
insuperable.  No  printer  who  can  read  could,  in 
ordinary  circumstances,  have  been  procured  to  pro- 


274         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

duce  such  a  pamphlet,  even  without  his  imprimatur, 
on  any  terms  whatever.    He  would  know  full  well 
that  the  risks  were  too  great.  More  crass  and  abom- 
inable criminal  libels  were  never  put  into  type.    The 
thing  could  only  have  been  printed  either  abroad 
or  at  a  private  press;  and,  from  the  character  of 
the  type  and  paper,  I  should  say  that  the  chances 
are  that  the  printing  was  done  at  a  private  press  in 
England.    The  type  was  new  and  the  paper  such 
as  is  readily  obtainable  in  London.    All  this  meant 
considerable  cost,  upon  which  the  authors  of  the 
pamphlet  could  not  hope  to  recoup  themselves,  in- 
asmuch as  they  gave  it  away  and  did  not  set  a  price 
upon  it;  besides  which  there  was  a  cost  of  postage 
and  clerical  work.     So  that  we  had  here  not  only 
malice   and  wicked   propaganda,   but  malice   and 
wicked  propaganda  which  were  willing  to  go  to  great 
expense  and  to  run  great  risks  for  the  expression  of 
themselves.    This  business,  and  other  similar  busi- 
nesses which  have  come  to  my  notice,  tend  to  con- 
vince me  that  there  are  plenty  of  minor  enthusiasts 
engaged  in  the  canonisation  of  Wilde,  and  that  they 
lack  neither  means  nor  energy,     I  use  the  phrase 
"minor   enthusiast''   advisedly  because  I  wish  to 
make  it  clear  that  I  do  not  suggest  that  any  person 
named  in  this  book  was  a  party  to  these  letters  or 
anonymous  scurrilities. 


Crosland  and  ''The  First  Stone"   275 

With  regard  to  'The  First  Stone"  itself,  I  have 
no  wish  to  apologise  for  it,  and  should  not  have  the 
slightest  objection  to  accepting  the  responsibility 
for  it — if  it  were  mine  to  accept.  But  it  is  not  mine, 
nor  did  I  suggest  or  advise  it,  or  have  hand  or  part 
in  its  production.  What  happened  was  this :  When 
I  obtained  through  my  solicitors  a  copy  of  the  un- 
published parts  of  ''De  Profundis,"  duly  authenti- 
cated by  Messrs.  Lewis  &  Lewis,  I  took  it,  without 
reading  it,  to  Mr.  Crosland.  I  did  this  of  my  own 
initiative  and  for  my  own  reasons.  Crosland  began 
to  read  it  in  my  presence.  He  had  not  read  more 
than  a  page  or  two  before  he  said :  "I  am  going  to 
read  this  manuscript  to  you,  word  for  word,  and 
I  am  going  to  put  absolutely  flat  and  straight  ques- 
tions to  you,  even  though  they  hurt  or  anger  you." 
I  said :  ''You  can  read  away,  my  dear  chap,  and  ask 
me  any  questions  you  like."  I  sat  there  for  four 
solid  hours,  face  to  face  with  the  man  who  probably 
knows  more  about  me  and  my  life  and  my  manner 
of  living  it  than  anybody  else  in  the  world,  and  I 
am  free  to  say  that  he  did  not  spare  me.  But  it  is 
necessary  to  remember  that,  up  to  this  time,  Cros- 
land had  never  had  any  other  version  of  the  history 
and  my  connection  with  Wilde  than  my  own.  When 
he  first  met  me  in  1903,  over  the  publication  of  some 
of  my  sonnets,  we  had  not  talked  together  three 


276         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

minutes  before  he  plumped  me  with  some  sharp 
questions  in  regard  to  myself  and  Wilde.  I  was 
able  at  once  to  give  him  straightforward  and  con- 
vincing answers  and,  in  good  times  and  bad,  from 
that  day  to  this,  he  has  believed  me,  as,  indeed,  he 
could  not  help  but  believe  me,  and  he  has  always 
and  rightly  acted  on  the  assumption  that  he  knew 
the  truth.  But  I  remembered  those  questions  of 
his,  and  it  was  partly  for  this  reason,  namely,  that 
I  courted  all  the  questions  he  could  devise,  that  I 
went  round  to  him  with  the  unpublished  ''De  Pro- 
fundis."  Here  was  new  material  of  which  neither 
he  nor  I  had  ever  had  the  smallest  inkling.  I  knew 
that  it  could  not  be  friendly  material,  otherwise  it 
would  not  have  been  put  up  by  Ransome's  solicitors, 
yet  I  placed  it  unreservedly  in  the  hands  of  my  closest 
friend,  a  critically  minded  person  of  whom  it  may  be 
said,  at  least,  that  neither  friendship  nor  any  other 
consideration  will  hold  or  restrain  him  where  mat- 
ters of  principle  are  concerned.  After  reading  the 
manuscript  Crosland  went  to  work  of  his  own  ac- 
cord and,  within  a  very  few  days,  "The  First  Stone" 
was  written  and  printed.  Whatever  may  be  its 
merits  or  faults  as  a  piece  of  writing,  it  is  certainly 
of  interest  as  exhibiting  the  effect  on  an  honest  mind 
of  Wilde's  stupid  and  ludicrous  outburst.  I  am  not 
concerned  either  to  praise  or  blame  the  poem,  but 


Crosland  and  *'The  First  Stone"   277 

it  will  last  Wilde  probably  a  good  deal  longer  than 
the  unpublished  parts  of  ''De  Profundis"  will  last 
me.  I  had  intended  to  republish  the  whole  poem 
in  this  book,  but  as  it  contains  quotations  taken 
direct  from  the  Ujipublished  portion  of  "De  Pro- 
fundis,"  I  have  been  reluctantly  compelled  to  aban- 
don my  intention. 


CHAPTER  XXV 

A  CHALLENGE  TO  MR.  ROSS 

I  DO  not  know  what  Mr.  Robert  Ross's  legal 
rights  as  Wilde's  literary  executor  were  until 
the  year  1906,  when  his  position  was  officially 
confirmed.  During  the  last  years  of  his  life  Wilde 
certainly  looked  to  me  to  do  all  that  might  be  neces- 
sary to  be  done  in  regard  to  his  literary  affairs  after 
his  death.  Ross  knew  this,  and  other  people  knew 
it.  Both  Wilde  and  I,  however,  had  been  accus- 
tomed to  look  upon  him  as  a  business  man,  and  I 
quite  admit  that  when  he  came  to  me  after  the 
funeral  and  asked  me  what  should  be  done  with 
Wilde's  papers,  I  told  him  to  act  as  he  thought  fit. 
The  first  occasion  upon  which  Ross  used  the  title 
of  literary  executor  was  in  Paris  after  the  funeral. 
Somebody  in  an  English  paper  had  suggested  that 
Wilde  had  been  buried  without  ceremony  and  that 
none  of  his  friends  had  thought  it  worth  while  to 
attend  the  funeral.  I  considered  that  this  was  an 
improper  statement,  and  a  long  telegram  was  writ- 
ten and  sent  to  the  paper  in  question,  the  Daily 

278 


A  Challenge  to  Mr.  Ross        279 

Express,  with  a  view  to  its  correction.  The  ques- 
tion arose  as  to  whether  I  should  sign  it  or  whether 
somebody  else  should  sign  it,  and  in  the  end  we 
decided  that  the  signature  should  be  Ross's.  After 
Ross  had  put  his  name  to  the  telegram  he  said  to  me : 
"It  will  carry  more  weight  if  I  were  to  put  'Literary 
executor  to  Oscar  Wilde'  under  my  name."  I  saw 
no  objection  to  this  at  the  time,  and  Ross  added 
the  words,  and  the  telegram  was  despatched  so 
signed.  So  far  as  I  am  aware,  that  is  the  only  man- 
date Ross  ever  had  from  anybody.  I  do  not  doubt 
that  his  position  has  been  confirmed  and  made  legal 
since  by  the  Receiver  of  Wilde's  estate  and  by 
Wilde's  sons.  Neither  do  I  doubt  that  Ross  has 
rendered  valuable  services  to  the  estate  and  admin- 
istered it  justly  and  well.  I  think  that  he  has  done 
many  things  which  are  scarcely  in  Wilde's  interest, 
however,  and  of  which  Wilde  would  have  disap- 
proved ;  such,  for  example,  as  his  publication  of  the 
version  of  the  "Ballad  of  Reading  Gaol,"  curtailed 
"for  the  benefit  of  reciters  and  their  audiences," 
and  his  dedication  of  "Intentions"  to  a  woman 
whom  Wilde  scarcely  knew,  in  his  own  name  rather 
than  Wilde's.  But  these  are  minor  matters,  and 
there  is  no  need  to  labour  them.  The  challenge  I 
have  to  issue  to  Mr.  Ross  has  to  do  with  the  ques- 
tion of  "De  Profundis." 


280         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

It  is  admitted  by  all  parties  concerned  that  this 
manuscript  was  addressed  to  me.  A  portion  of 
the  work  has  already  been  published,  under  Mr. 
Ross's  sanction.  The  other  half  he  has  presented 
to  the  nation  through  the  British  Museum.  So  that 
it  is  evident  that  Mr.  Ross  feels  that  the  whole  man- 
uscript should  be  preserved.  Sufficient  of  the  con- 
tents of  the  second  or  unpublished  part  has  been 
made  public  in  the  Law  Courts  and  in  the  press  to 
make  it  quite  obvious  that  the  manuscript  relates 
chiefly  to  me,  and  relates  to  me  in  a  very  bitter, 
malicious  and  libellous  way.  It  is  consequently  a 
document  in  which  at  least  two  living  persons  are 
very  seriously  concerned.  Neither  Mr.  Ross  nor 
any  other  person  dare  print  or  publish  the  thing 
as  it  stands,  because  of  its  libellous  character,  and 
they  know  quite  well  that,  apart  from  any  action 
I  might  take,  the  Dowager  Marchioness  of  Queens- 
berry  would  be  absolutely  sure  to  take  action  against 
them  if  the  manuscript  were  published.  Mr.  Ross 
therefore  stores  this  libel  at  the  British  Museum 
till  1960,  when,  in  the  course  of  human  events,  my 
mother  will  have  passed  away  and  I,  too,  shall  be 
dead.  At  this  happy  juncture  the  discretion  of  the 
British  Museum  authorities  is  to  come  into  play. 
As  a  matter  of  fact,  however,  the  manuscript  will 
be  out  of  copyright  by  1960  and,  unless  the  British 


A  Challenge  to  Mr.  Ross        281 

Museum  destroy  it  meanwhile — which,  by  the  way, 
they  would  not  be  within  their  legal  rights  in  doing 
— there  is  nothing  to  hinder  publication,  inasmuch 
as  it  is  open  knowledge  that  copies  exist  and  are  in 
other  hands  than  those  of  the  British  Museum. 
Now  I  think  it  will  be  commonly  admitted  that  a 
person  who  is  attacked  possesses  de  facto  the  right 
to  reply ;  furthermore,  it  is  the  duty  of  a  person  who 
knows  that  he  has  been  accused,  as  I  have  been  ac- 
cused, to  defend  and  clear  himself,  if  he  can.  There- 
fore it  is  that  I  conceive  it  to  be  my  duty  thoroughly 
to  sift  and  examine  the  charges  which  Oscar  Wilde 
has  brought  against  me,  and  to  rebut  them  and  give 
proof  that  they  are  false  and  unsubstantial.  It  is 
impossible  that  this  can  be  done  completely  and 
satisfactorily  unless  I  have  from  Mr.  Ross,  who, 
rightly  or  wrongly,  considers  himself  the  legal 
owner  of  the  copyright,  permission  to  print  very 
lengthy  portions  of  the  manuscript  now  in  the  hands 
of  the  British  Museum.  In  view  of  the  subtle  way 
in  which  the  manuscript  is  written,  it  would  not  be 
sufficient  for  my  purpose  to  make  extracts  here  and 
there  and  deal  with  them  singly.  The  only  proper 
method,  in  the  circumstances,  would  be  to  print  the 
unpublished  ''De  Profundis''  in  extenso,  with  my 
running  comment,  either  beneath  it  or  on  the  oppo- 
site pages.    Mr.  Ross  is  acquainted  with  the  whole 


282         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

contents  of  this  manuscript,  and  he  contends  that 
he  is  the  owner  of  the  copyright.  I  challenge  him 
to  give  his  permission  for  the  manuscript  to  be  used 
in  the  manner  I  have  indicated.  My  proposition  is 
a  perfectly  fair  and  square  one.  I  will  publish  the 
whole  manuscript,  word  for  word  and  line  for  line, 
without  omitting  or  curtailing  anything,  and  over  it 
I  will  publish  my  reply,  and  the  public  at  large  shall 
be  left  to  judge  between  Oscar  Wilde  and  Lord 
Alfred  Douglas.  Mr.  Ross's  acquiescence  in  this 
proposal  cannot  hurt  him  in  the  least.  Nobody  has 
anything  to  gain  out  of  the  manuscript,  inasmuch  as 
Mr.  Ross  dare  not  publish  it  himself,  or  get  any- 
body else  to  publish  it,  in  my  lifetime  or  the  life- 
time of  my  mother.  He  knows  that  it  is  a  libel  on 
both  of  us,  and  the  least  he  can  do  if  he  is  a  fair- 
minded  man  is  to  give  me  an  opportunity  of  dealing 
openly  and  fully  with  the  accusations  involved.  If 
he  refuses  to  do  this,  I  take  it  that  the  public  will 
draw  their  own  conclusions  as  to  the  truth  or  falsity 
of  these  accusations. 


[^  ■  CHAPTER  XXVI 

WILDE  IN  RUSSIA,   FRANCE  AND  GERMANY 

A  STOCK  argument  of  Wilde's  critical  friends 
/\  has  always  been  that,  even  if  it  can  be 
JL.  jL  demonstrated  that  Wilde  has  been  grossly 
overrated  in  England,  the  fact  of  his  popularity  in 
foreign  parts  proves  that  there  is  in  him  the  literary 
stuff  which  goes  to  the  making  of  immortals.  This, 
of  course,  is  not  philosophically  true,  being,  in  fact, 
the  merest  fudge.  Wilde's  books,  it  is  true,  have 
been  translated  into  various  languages — but  which 
books?  Well,  "Dorian  Gray"  and  "Salome,"  for 
the  most  part,  with  "De  Profundis"  for  a  bad  third, 
and  the  rest  nowhere.  What  Wilde  abroad  really 
means  is  very  prettily  indicated  by  the  following 
letter  which  was  addressed  to  the  editor  of  Every- 
man by  one  of  Wilde's  translators : — 

"Sir, 

"Please  let  me  produce  some  figures  to  up- 
hold your  correspondent's  statement  in  your  issue 
of  June  6th  as  to  Oscar  Wilde's  popularity  in  Russia. 

"I  have  had  the  honour  of  translating  Wilde's 

283 


284         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

works  into  Russian  and  can  state  that  his  books 
were  among  the  best-selling  fiction  in  this  country. 
Some  of  Oscar  Wilde's  masterpieces,  such  as  The 
Picture  of  Dorian  Gray/  'De  Profundis/  'Salome/ 
published  in  popular  editions  at  10  kopecks  (2>4d.) 
each  have  had  a  circulation  (in  the  last  four  to  five 
years)  from  eighty  to  one  hundred  thousand  each, 
and  are  still  selling  briskly.  Wilde's  comedies  are 
constantly  on  the  repertory  of  the  Moscow  and  St. 
Petersburg  Imperial  State  Theatres,  not  counting 
the  innumerable  provincial  stages. 

''I  can  assure  you  that  you  will  not  find  one  edu- 
cated person  in  Russia  who  has  not  read  Wilde's 
works.  I  have  received  in  the  last  seven  to  eight 
years  hundreds  of  letters  from  quite  unknown 
people  all  over  Russia,  with  the  expression  of  the 
strongest  and  sincerest  admiration  for  one  of  'the 
greatest  writers  of  the  world.' 

''I  must  frankly  acknowledge  that  nearly  all  the 
letters  of  my  correspondents,  ranking  from  all 
classes  of  Russian  life,  contain  many  bitter  com- 
ments on  the  treatment  Wilde  received  in  the  hands 
of  his  countrymen. 

"I  am,  Sir,  etc., 
"Michael  Lykiardopulos, 
"Secretary  of  the 

"Moscow."  "  'Moscow  Art  Theatre.' 


In  Russia,  France,  and  Germany   285 

This  letter  gives  a  curious  insight  into  the  whole 
business.  Of  course,  ''Dorian  Gray"  and  ''Salome'' 
at  twopence-halfpenny  in  England  would  sell  like 
wildfire,  just  as  a  pirated  '"De  Profundis''  was  sold 
a  little  while  ago  at  a  penny  on  the  street  corners. 
Nobody  professed  that  this  pirated  "De  Profundis'' 
was  being  sold  because  of  its  literary  value :  it  was 
sold  and  offered  for  sale  in  the  gutter  as  "the  con- 
fession of  Oscar  Wilde,"  and  it  was  bought  in  just 
the  same  way  that  the  alleged  confession  of  any 
other  criminal  would  be  bought.  So  that  these 
books  at  ten  kopecks  in  Russia  point  their  own 
moral. 

I  do  not  know  how  cheaply  or  how  dearly  Wilde 
is  sold  in  Paris  and  Berlin.  But  I  do  know  that  the 
vogue  he  has  in  both  cities  is  largely  based  on  his 
iniquities,  and  that  this  fact  is  equally  deplored  by 
right-thinking  Frenchmen  and  right-thinking  Ger- 
mans. In  the  scandals  which  of  late  years  have 
disgraced  Berlin,  the  Wilde  factor  has  been  only  too 
evident.  The  scandals  to  which  I  refer  have  oc- 
curred in  so-called  literary  and  artistic  circles ;  and 
wherever  you  have  such  scandals  in  such  circles 
there  you  are  bound  always  to  find  that  Oscar  Wilde 
sits  enthroned.  It  is  a  deplorable  thing,  doubtless, 
but  what  is  one  to  expect  in  the  face  of  "Dorian 
Gray"  ?    The  bad  influence  of  Wilde  in  both  France 


286         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

and  Germany  has  been  noted  and  deprecated  by 
more  than  one  eminent  writer,  and  the  main  force 
of  criticism  in  both  countries  is  in  arms  against  it. 
In  Russia  his  admirers  belong  chiefly  to  the  anar- 
chistic and  revolutionary  sections  of  the  community, 
who,  being  in  a  large  measure  decadents  and  crim- 
inals themselves,  have  a  natural  sympathy  with  the 
work  of  a  decadent  criminal.  In  Russia  they  say 
Wilde  must  be  a  great  man  because  he  went  to 
prison  and  is  universally  loved  and  admired  by  the 
English.  In  England  we  are  told  that  Wilde's 
greatness  cannot  be  disputed,  inasmuch  as  he  is 
loved  and  admired  in  Russia — at  10  kopecks  a  time. 
Mr.  Ransome  is  very  amusing  on  Wilde's  foreign 
successes.  He  says  that  we  ''cannot  afford  to 
neglect  the  opinion  of  critical  Germany,''  which,  in 
point  of  fact,  is  just  the  opinion  we  can  afford  to 
neglect;  and  he  quotes  Mr.  Ross  as  follows:  "In 
1901,  within  a  year  of  the  author's  death,  it 
("Salome")  was  produced  in  Berlin;  from  that 
moment  it  has  held  the  European  stage.  It  has 
run  for  a  longer  consecutive  period  in  Germany 
than  any  play  by  any  Englishman,  not  excepting 
Shakespeare.  Its  popularity  has  extended  to  all 
countries  where  it  is  not  prohibited.  It  is  per- 
formed throughout  Europe,  Asia  and  America.  It 
is  played  even  in  Yiddish."     One  would  imagine 


In  Russia,  France,  and  Germany   287 

that  all  Europe,  Asia  and  America  had  rushed  in 
a  body  to  see  this  compelling  drama.  The  facts 
are  that,  while  it  may  have  been  staged  at  theatres 
of  standing  in  Berlin  and  other  cities,  and  may 
have  had  a  long  run  in  Berlin,  its  vogue  elsewhere 
is  not  associated  with  either  distinguished  theatres 
or  the  best  actors,  having  been,  in  fact,  a  rather 
hole-and-corner  affair,  and,  whatever  may  have  hap- 
pened years  ago,  one  may  travel  the  globe  now- 
adays without  finding  that  Wilde  comes  anywhere 
near  holding  the  stage  in  a  substantial  or  perennial 
way.  Wilde,  of  course,  has  been  pushed  and 
boomed  for  all  he  is  worth  and  for  a  good  deal  more 
than  he  is  worth.  The  result  is  that  he  has  come 
into  a  sort  of  artificial  kingdom  of  his  own,  on  the 
Continent  and  in  America  just  as  in  England.  But 
I  maintain  that  it  is  a  kingdom  based  on  rottenness ; 
that  it  is  an  utterly  insignificant  kingdom  in  so  far 
as  it  is  taken  to  mean  merit  or  worthiness  in  Wilde, 
and  that,  by  its  very  nature,  it  is  bound  to  fall  and 
be  forgotten.  Wilde's  supporters  would  appear  to 
be  very  conscious  of  this  fact,  and  that  is  perhaps 
why  some  of  them  fall  into  such  fits  of  rage  if  any- 
body ventures  to  suggest  that  their  idol  is  not  en- 
tirely gold.  There  are  no  plays  of  Wilde's  and  no 
books  of  Wilde's  which  can  last  on  their  literary 
merits.     His  only  chance  is  that  he  suffered  im- 


288         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

prisonment  and  he  wrote  certain  improprieties. 
These  have  been  put  on  a  different  basis  for  an  en- 
during literary  reputation,  even  in  Asia  or  among 
the  Jews. 


CHAPTER  XXVII 

THE  SMALLER  FRY 

I  SUPPOSE  that  the  number  of  little  poets, 
little  fictionists,  and,  above  all,  little  critics, 
who  imagine  that  they  owe  themselves  to  Wilde 
is  infinite.  His  peculiar  form  of  humour,  which 
seemed  to  have  genius  behind  it  and  so  dazzled 
everybody  in  Wilde's  own  time,  was  soon  discovered 
to  be  wonderfully  easy  of  imitation,  and  really  to 
require  very  little  brains  in  its  production.  The 
consequence  has  been  that  everybody  who  consid- 
ered himself  anybody  took  up  with  it,  as  it  were; 
and  it  has  become  so  common  that  it  is  no  longer 
taken  for  humour  at  all.  All  our  dullest  young  men 
who  happen  to  be  engaged  or  interested  in  a  branch 
of  the  arts  have  talked,  thought  and  written  Wilde 
for  years  past.  Some  middle-aged  and  elderly  gen- 
tlemen who  began  when  Wilde  was  at  his  zenith  are 
still  at  it,  and  apparently  nothing  will  stop  them ; 
which  means,  of  course,  that  humour  in  England 
has  altogether  lost  both  its  point  and  its  usefulness. 
The  humour  of  the  day  has  a  dull  cruelty  about 

289 


290         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

it  which  it  formerly  lacked.  Its  object  might  almost 
be,  not  to  make  people  laugh,  but  to  make  them  cry. 
The  fiercer  and  more  heartless  it  is,  the  better  it  is 
supposed  to  be  appreciated.  Furthermore,  instead 
of  being  kept  in  its  proper  place  in  the  scheme  of 
things,  it  has  been  allowed  to  run  riot  whenever 
its  authors  choose  to  let  it  loose.  To  be  comic  in 
a  bitter  and  insincere  way  seems  to  be  the  ambition 
of  most  of  the  eminent  people  one  can  nowadays 
come  across.  We  have  comic  judges  and  comic 
counsel  who  manage  to  keep  the  King's  Courts  in 
ripples  of  merriment.  We  have  even  a  comic  magis- 
trate or  two.  In  Parliament  the  mordant  humour- 
ist and  the  man  who  can  say  sharp  things  are  the 
only  ones  to  be  listened  to;  sarcastic  bishops  and 
witty  clerics  abound.  And  as  for  the  gentlemen  of 
the  press,  they  are  all  bent  on  the  leer,  at  whatever 
cost.  If  you  look  closely  into  these  professed  or  un- 
professed  fun-makers,  you  are  bound  to  perceive 
that  the  majority  of  them  are  little  Oscar  Wildes 
to  a  man.  They  look  on  life  with  a  confirmed  squint 
and  they  cannot  see  that  there  is  anything  human 
about  which  it  is  not  desirable  that  they  should 
make  jokes.  Only  a  little  while  back  we  had  the 
spectacle  of  an  English  judge  indulging  his  fancy 
in  Wildeisms  in  the  course  of  a  trial  for  murder. 
In  itself,  his  Lordship's  epigram  or  paradox,  or 


The  Smaller  Fry  291 

whatever  you  like  to  call  it,  would  help  or  hurt  no- 
body ;  but  the  fact  that  it  was  forthcoming  in  such 
circumstances  indicates  pretty  plainly  the  pass  to 
which  we  have  come. 

Wilde's  answer  to  everything  was  by  quip  or  fleer, 
or  a  plain  perversion  of  the  truth.  He  had  no 
serious  views  or  intentions  about  anything,  and  he 
considered  that  the  art  of  life  lay  in  flippancy. 
People  who  read  him  and  make  a  gospel  of  him  can 
scarcely  be  expected  not  to  imitate  him,  and  imitate 
him  they  certainly  do;  so  that  nowadays  we  have 
hundreds  of  little  Wildes  where  formerly  there  was 
only  one  Wilde — and  a  not  over  big  one  at  that. 
They  swarm  and  spread  themselves  over  everything 
that  is  decent,  and  they  parrot  Wilde  at  everybody 
who  comes  near  them.  They  have  seen  it  in  'Tn- 
tentions"  that  there  is  no  sin  save  stupidity,  and 
tha\:  all  art  is  immoral,  and  they  imagine  that  the 
world  can  be  run  on  these  two  remarkably  shallow 
and  unreliable  axioms. 

I  am  quite  free  to  admit  that  in  a  literary  sense 
the  world  does  present  the  appearance  of  being  so 
run.  The  preponderating  weight  of  contemporary 
authorship  and  criticism  would  indeed  seem  to  be 
on  the  Wilde  side.  This,  of  course,  is  unthinkably 
pitiable,  but  we  cannot  get  beyond  the  fact.  The 
reason  is  not  far  to  seek,  and  it  will  be  found  to 


292         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

lie  in  the  shallowness  which  always  characterises 
the  popular  view  of  large  questions.  Wilde  began 
by  asserting  that  the  only  sin  was  stupidity,  yet 
he  ended  with  the  assertion  that  the  supreme  vice 
is  shallowness.  I  do  not  say  that  shallowness  is  by 
any  means  the  supreme  vice ;  there  can  be  no  doubt, 
however,  that  it  is  the  very  commonest  vice  among 
people  who  imagine  themselves  to  be  thinkers.  It 
is,  in  consequence  of  this  very  circumstance,  that 
to  attack  Wilde  nowadays  is  to  be  howled  down,  just 
as  to  have  praised  him  eighteen  years  ago  was  to  be 
execrated.  The  shallowness  of  1895  could  not  see 
an  inch  below  the  surface  of  Wilde's  glaring  vicious- 
ness.  It  went  the  length  of  taking  his  name  off  his 
own  plays  and  relegating  him  to  the  position  of  a 
man  who  was  well-nigh  without  literary  existence. 
The  shallowness  of  1914  is  unable  to  look  beneath 
the  success,  enormous  sales,  enormous  popularity, 
and  what  not,  which  have  resulted  from  the  Wilde 
boom,  and  it  is  quite  incapable  of  recognising  or 
appreciating  the  dangers  which  lie  beneath  it.  We 
are  asked  by  tearful  counsel  and  writers  of  pathetic 
nonsense  for  the  penny  weeklies  to  forget  Wilde's 
vices.  For  my  own  part,  I  certainly  do  not  wish 
to  revive  them  or  insist  upon  them.  But  I  am  not 
prepared  to  forget  them  unless  his  apologists  cease 
to  discuss  them. 


The  Smaller  Fry  293 

Nobody  will  question  that  what  has  been  termed 
the  revulsion  of  feeling  in  Wilde's  favour  was 
largely  brought  about  by  the  publication  of  *'De 
Profundis."  This  book,  which,  as  I  have  shown, 
does  not  in  the  least  accurately  represent  Wilde's 
feelings,  owes  its  success  in  no  small  measure  to  the 
wide  publicity  which  w^s  given  to  the  statements 
that  it  had  been  written  in  prison,  and  that  it  is  a 
sort  of  repentant  confession  and  authentic  dying 
speech  of  its  author.  As  we  have  seen,  and  as  will 
become  still  more  apparent  when  the  unpublished 
''De  Profundis"  sees  the  light,  nothing  can  be  fur- 
ther from  the  truth.  The  small  fry  may  go  on  ad- 
miring Wilde,  and  they  may  go  on  pointing  to  "De 
Profundis"  as  a  work  of  a  sainted  martyr — the 
swan-song  of  a  contrite,  broken  and  bleeding  heart, 
and  so  on,  as  long  as  they  please.  But  they  will 
never  get  away  from  the  hard  facts  of  the  case, 
which  are  quite  the  reverse  of  what  has  been  gen- 
erally assumed  and  supposed. 


CHAPTER  XXVIII 

TO  BE  DONE  WITH  IT  ALL 

WHEN  Wilde  had  completed  the  "De  Pro- 
fundis"  manuscript,  he  is  understood  to 
have  written  to  Ross  to  say  that  he  had 
rid  his  bosom  of  much  perilous  stuflf.  I  will  do  him 
the  justice  to  agree  that  he  got  into  the  "De  Pro- 
fundis"  manuscript  as  a  whole,  more  real  Wilde 
than  ever  he  put  into  any  other  piece  of  work. 
Before,  he  had  given  us,  as  far  as  in  him  lay,  Wilde 
the  artist  with  frequent  glimpses  of  Wilde  the 
shameful  liver  and  vicious  thinker.  But  in  the  com- 
plete ''De  Profundis"  he  gives  us  Wilde  the  man. 
The  bottom  of  his  vicious  and  halting  soul  is  laid 
bare  for  us  in  this  extraordinary  work.  That  he 
had  it  in  him  to  give  himself  utterly  and  entirely 
away  as  he  did  is  incomprehensible,  and  can  only 
be  set  down  to  the  fact  that  the  reticence  which 
had  previously  been  his  safeguard  and  saviour  was 
entirely  destroyed  by  his  rage  on  perceiving  that  the 
life  he  had  succeeded  in  living  would  never  again 
be  possible  to  him. 

294 


To  Be  Done  with  It  All        295 

My  own  task  is  finished  here  and  now.  I  have 
taken  what  is  practically  Wilde's  own  picture  of 
himself  and  unveiled  it.  Before  he  went  to  prison 
he  had  exposed  to  the  public  gaze  a  picture  of  him- 
self which  was  all  lights  and  rose  and  purple.  To 
this  picture  his  friends  have  been  most  faithful. 
Of  their  own  initiative  they  decked  it  out  with 
supererogatory  daubs  of  pretty  and  bewitching 
colour ;  and  they  set  it  round  with  a  beautiful  gold 
frame,  surmounted  with  a  crown  of  gilded  bays  and 
something  which  is  intended  for  a  halo.  Of  the 
shadows  and  dubious  blacks  and  browns  which 
Wilde  himself  prepared  by  his  life  and  by  his  lucu- 
brations in  gaol  they  have  been  anxious  to  take  no 
notice.  They  were  only  brought  out  of  their 
seclusion  as  weapons  wherewith  I  might  be  de- 
feated. The  pot  of  blackness  was  brought  into  a 
Court  of  Justice  and  there  emptied  before  the  gaze 
of  all  beholders,  as  was  supposed,  for  my  upsetting. 
Then  the  mess  was  all  scraped  up,  as  best  it  could 
be,  and  hurried  back  to  the  British  Museum;  and, 
honour  being  now  satisfied  and  all  being  over,  every- 
body, it  was  hoped,  would  speedily  forget  the  little 
black  pot.  But  not  so:  it  will  never  be  forgotten 
and  must  always  be  remembered  by  anybody  who 
wishes  to  look  honestly  at  the  features  of  Wilde. 

So  far  as  I  am  concerned,  I  have  drawn  my  own 


296         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

picture  from  the  man  as  I  knew  him,  and  from  his 
writings,  which  are  readily  accessible  and  can  be 
pursued  by  all  who  care  to  take  the  trouble.  If  I 
had  been  disposed  to  write  the  present  book  in  the 
vein  of  ''De  Profundis,"  published  or  unpublished, 
it  would  not  have  been  difficult,  from  a  literary  point 
of  view,  for  me  to  do  so.  I  could  have  embellished 
my  pages  with  tears  and  regrets  and  moral  reflec- 
tions, not  to  say  with  quotations  from  the  classics 
and  Holy  Scripture,  just  as  readily  and  at  just  as 
great  length  as  Wilde  has  done.  Surely  if  any  man 
has  had  cause  for  tears  and  bitter  regrets,  I  have 
had  cause.  All  my  life,  from  twenty  years  of  age 
up,  has  been  overshadowed  and  filled  with  scandal 
and  grief  through  my  association  with  this  man, 
Oscar  Wilde.  I  am  not  going  to  shed  public  or 
private  tears  about  it,  and  I  am  not  going  to  waste 
my  breath  in  vain  regrets.  I  have  absolutely  an 
easy  conscience  as  regards  my  treatment  of  Wilde, 
both  before  and  since  his  death.  If  I  have  hurt 
anybody  at  all  it  has  been  myself  and  my  family, 
and  I  have  done  this  only  through  misplaced  loyalty 
to  my  friend  and  a  too  high  regard  for  chivalry. 
I  now  say  all  that  I  have  had  to  say  about  Wilde, 
whether  with  respect  to  my  personal  relationship 
to  him  or  my  mature  view  of  his  complete  writings. 
It  will  be  noted  that,  just  as  I  have  refrained  from 


To  Be  Done  with  It  All        297 

weeping  and  moralising,  I  have  equally  refrained 
from  details  of  petty  quarrels  and  misunderstand- 
ings. I  have  not  accused  him  of  gobbling  my  food 
and  spilling  my  wine  and  devouring  my  substance ; 
I  have  not  charged  him,  as  I  easily  might,  with 
corrupting  my  intellect  and  assisting  me  in  the  care- 
less waste  of  some  of  the  best  years  of  my  life.  I 
have  never  said,  as  he  says  of  me,  that  I  became  a 
child  in  his  hands  and  that  we  never  met  "except  in 
the  gutter,''  and  never  conversed  except  about 
''loathsome  things.''  I  hold  that  a  man's  acts  are 
his  own  affairs,  even  if  they  lead  to  his  ruin 
and  disgrace.  The  shifting  of  responsibility  is  no 
work  for  me  or  any  other  person  of  sense.  I  accept 
full  responsibility  for  everything  I  have  done  or 
said  in  regard  to  this  affair.  For  my  own  indis- 
cretions and  carelessness  I  could  not  honestly  blame 
anybody.  I  have  been  punished  for  them  and  shall 
doubtless  go  on  being  punished  for  them ;  but  there 
they  are,  and  all  the  water  in  the  sea  will  not  wash 
them  out.  This  book  is  not  an  apology  for  me, 
neither  is  it  a  work  undertaken  on  the  tu  quoque  or 
tit-for-tat  principle  against  Wilde.  I  am  of  opinion 
that,  in  the  circumstances,  there  is  no  man  living 
who  can  put  Oscar  Wilde  into  his  true  relation  to 
the  life  and  literature  of  his  time  more  accurately 
than  myself.    I  have  always  known  this — though,  at 


298         Oscar  Wilde  and  Myself 

the  same  time,  I  have  hitherto  refrained  from  put- 
ting my  pen  to  paper.  My  enemies  have  compelled 
me  to  defend  myself,  and  if,  in  the  course  of  that 
defence,  I  have  had  to  tear  away  some  of  the  un- 
deserved laurels  which  have  been  heaped  upon  his 
brow  and  dissipated  some  of  the  undeserved  incense 
which  has  been  offered  up  at  his  shrine,  I  have  done 
him  no  wrong,  and  I  feel  that  I  may  conceivably 
have  made  a  slight  contribution  to  the  literary  and 
general  good. 

It  seems  to  me  a  great  deal  more  than  probable 
that  the  present  volume  will  rouse  a  considerable 
deal  of  what  is  called  controversy.  The  right  of 
criticism  is  everybody's  right,  and  I  shall  not  hope 
to  be  spared  criticism  or,  for  that  matter,  even  con- 
tradiction. I  shall  only  beg  that  those  reviewers 
whose  duty  and  business  it  will  be  to  deal  with  this 
book  may  remember  that  I  am  entitled  to  exactly 
as  much  justice  in  this  world  as  Wilde  and  Wilde's 
friends.  The  forces  against  me  are  undoubtedly 
numerous  and  powerful.  On  the  other  hand,  it  is 
very  certain  that  I  shall  not  run  away  from  them. 


Index 


Adey,  Mr.  More,  130 

Alexander,  Sir  G.,  96 

"Androcles  and  the  Lion,  True 
Story  of,"  217 

Arnold,  Matthew,  12;  imitations 
of,  200 

Art  and  Morality — Wilde's  dic- 
tum, 277,  282,  305 

Astbury,  Mr.  Justice,  84,  85 


B 


"Ballad    of    Perkin    Warbeck," 

125 

"Ballad  of  Reading  Gaol,"  122, 
124,  198,  200,  207 
Accepted  opinions,  deference 

to,  143,  210,  212 
Model,  210 
Publication,  131,  144 
Refused    by    a     New    York 

paper,  143 
Ross's,    Mr.,    curtailed    ver- 
sion, 293 
Wilde's  best  work,   140,   142, 
209,  212 
"Ballad  of  St.  Vitus,"  125 
Barrie,  Sir  J.  M.,  222 
Beardsley,  Aubrey,  34,  60,  197 
Beerbohm,  Mr.  Max,   57 
Berneval,  Wilde  at,  108,  118,  119, 
121,  123 
Correspondence  with  Author, 

119 
Money    resources,    108,    118, 
120,  129,  134,  140 
Bierce,  Ambrose,  217 
Blunt,  Mr.  Wilfrid,  64 
Bouche,  M.  du,  dentist,  138 


British  Museum  authorities  and 
the  unpublished  portions  of 
"De  Profundis,"  8,  84,  151, 
233-234,  280 

Browning,  62,  216,  242 

Browning,  Mrs.,  198 

"Burden  of  Itys,"  200,  207 

Burne-Jones,  62 

Bussell,  Dr.,  14 


Cab-driving  story,  22 
Cairns,  late  Lord,  64 
Campbell,  Mr.,  k.c,  126,  233 
"Canterville  Ghost,"  220 
Carson,   Sir  Edward,  94 
"Charmides,"  200 
Chesterton,  Mr.  G.,  217 
"City  of  the  Soul,"  16,  171 
Clarke,   Sir   Edward — 

Queensberry  proceedings, 

withdrawal  from,  91,  94 
Subsequent  trials,  defence  of 
Wilde,   95,  99 
Crabbet  Club,  64-67 
Crewe,   Lord,  64 
Crosland,  Mr.  T.  W.  H.,  186 
Cross-examination  of  Author 
on     unpublished     part     of 
"De  Profundis,"  234,  275 
"First  Stone,"  272 
Outlook  article  on  Ransome 
trial,  156 
Curzon,  Lord,  64 
Cust,  Mr.  Harry,  64 


Daily    ^  Chronicle,      review      of 

"Dorian  Gray,"  264 
Dante,  242 


299 


300 


Index 


Darling,  Mr.  Justice,  7,  8,  9,  51, 
107,  181,  214,  238 
Naples,  reputation  of,  126 
Tribute   to   Author's  literary 

talent,  274 
"De  Profundis,"  8,  25,  83 

Copy  alleged  to  have  been  in 

Author's  possession,  7,  148 
Foreign  reputation,  283 
Letter  addressed  to  Author- 
no   indication   in  published 

portion,   150,  232 
Origin  of — Anger  at  Author's 

apparent      desertion,      112, 

1 1 5-1 16,   121 
Preface,  146 
Property  in,  8,  236 
Publication — 

Propriety  question,  153 

Wilde's  instructions  to  Mr. 
Ross,  148-149 

Wilde's  intentions,  alterna- 
tive  possibilities,    151-152 
Revulsion      of      feehng      in 

Wilde's     favour     resulting, 

293 
Sherard,  Mr.,  on,  114-115 
Unpublished       portions — At- 
tacks on  Author,  8,  25,  83^ 
British     Museum     authori- 
ties, MS.  given  to,  not  to 
be  published  till  i960,  8, 
151,  233,  280 

Injustice       to       Author, 
Challenge  to  Mr.  Ross, 
157,  281-282,  295 
Charges  at   Ransome  trial, 

158  et  seq. 
Copies  in  existence,  281 
Cross-examination   of   Au- 
thor   by    Mr.    Crosland, 

233,   275 

Injunction  precluding  Au- 
thor from  quoting,  83, 
158 

Secrecy  and  treachery,  25, 
115,  146,  149.  165.  249 

Sole  attempt  at  confession, 

Wilde's    picture    of    himself, 

294-295 
Wilde's    reputation,   probable 
effect  on,  237,  239 


''Dead  Poet,"  sonnet,  27 
"Disciple,"  17 
"Dorian  Gray,"   14,  45 

Character    modelled    on   Au- 
thor, allegation,  254 
Daily  Chronicle  article,  264 
Foreign  reputation,  283 
Poisonous  nature,  257,  265 

Wilde's  admission,  229,  264 
Preface,  45 
Queensberry  proceedings,  use 

in,  94 
Ransome,  Mr.,  on,  243 
St.   James's   Gazette    review, 
258 
Douglas,  Lady  Alfred,  167,  195 
Douglas,    Lord  Alfred — 
Exploits  at  Winchester,  11 
Intimacy   with   Wilde — Scan- 
dal    resulting,     etc.,     28, 
72-73,  189,  193,  et  seq. 
Persecution  of  Author  re- 
sulting.   See  sub-heading 
Scapegoat 
Vicious        tendencies        in 
Wilde,  no  evidence  of,  74 
Letters  to  Wilde,  use  at  Ran- 
some trial,  etc.,  76,  99,  106, 
166,  167,  251,  252 
Literary   work— ^ 
Academy      editorship,     26, 

186,   19s,  256 
Ballad      form,     study     of, 

124-125 
DarHng's,  Mr.  Justice,  trib- 
ute, 254 
Oxford,  18 
Wilde's    debt    to    Author, 

124-125 
For  particular  poems,  etc., 
see  their  names 
Loyalty,    defence    of    Wilde 
after    his    conviction,    etc., 
26,  27,  32,  296 
Labouchere,  letters  to,  181- 

182 
Letters  to  newspapers,  etc., 

123,  124,  199-201 
Scientific       and       medical 
grounds  of  defence,  182 
Refer  also  to  titles  Naples, 
Paris,  Trials,  etc. 
Marriage,  167,  195 


Ind 


ex 


301 


Douglas,  Lord  Alfred   (cont.) 
Money  relations  with  Wilde, 
allegations     of     expense 
caused  to  Wilde,  etc.,  69, 
70,  82 
Algiers,   161-165 
Goring,  160-161 
Loans  from  Author,  71 
Solitary   instance   of   re- 
payment, 162 
Monte  Carlo,  87 
Refer  also  to  titles  Naples, 
Paris,  and  Trials 
Oxford  career,  11 
Collisions  with  authorities, 

etc.,  20-23 
Warkworth,  Lord,  and  the 
Newdigate,  18-19 
Partnership  in  vice,  corrupt- 
ing Wilde,  charges  of,  106, 
116,  169 
Scapegoat— Persecution        in 
connection  with  Wilde  af- 
fair, 4-5,  87,  88,  93,  106,  107, 
194,  295-296 
Blackmailing    attempts,     5, 

194,  195 
Legal  proceedings,  collapse 

of  calumniators,  5,  196 
Letters    to     Lady     Alfred 

Douglas,  195 
Loyalty  impugned,  slanders 
reaching  Wilde,   etc.,  88, 
194 
Pamphlet,  "The  Writing  on 

the  Floor,"  273 
Paris.  109-110 
Policy  in  regard  to,  5,  247 
Posterity,  appeal  to,  226-227 
Douglas,  Lord,  of  Hawick,  loi 
Dowson,  late  Ernest,  57,  199 
Drumlanrig,  Viscount,  58 
"Duchess  of  Padua,"  210 


Encombe,  late  Viscount,  11,  14 


"First  Stone,"  274 

Foote,     Mr.,     and     the     Revue 

Blanche  article,  187 
Fortnightly,    Wilde's    essays    in, 

221 


France — 

Vice   in — A   comparison   and 

an  excuse,  245 
Wilde  faction  in,  246,  285,  286 
Freethinker     and     the     Revue 
Blanche  article,  187 


"Garden  of  Eros,"  207^ 
Germany,    Wilde    cult    in — Ber- 
lin scandals,  etc.,  285,  286 
Giles,     Miss     Althea — Drawings 
for    "The     Harlot's    House," 
145 

H 

"Happy  Prince,"  219 
Harcourt,  Mr.  "Lulu,"  64 
"Harlot's  House,"  145 
Harris,  Mr.  Frank,  57,  137,  141, 

217,  221 
Headlam,   Rev.   Stewart,   loi 
Hood,  imitations  of,  205 
Hope,  Mr.  Adrian,  138 
Houghton,  Lord,  64 
"House  of  Judgment,"  17 
"House  of  Pomegranates,"  219 
Howard,  Hubert,  65 
"Humanitad,"  200,  207 
Humieres,  Vicomte  d',  64 
Humor  of  To-day— Wilde's  in- 
fluence, 289-290 
Humphreys,  Mr.,  93 


"Ideal  Husband,"  124,  158,  223 
"Importance  of  being  Earnest," 

50,  124,  221,  22s 
Imprisonment.         See       Prison 

Period 
Ingleby,       Mr. — Biography      of 

Wilde,  248 
"Intentions,"  14,  214-215 

Dedication  by  Mr.  Ross,  279 
Poisonous  nature,  229 
Irving,   Henry,   Wilde's   sonnets 

to,  44 


Jackson,  Holbrooke,  150 
Johnson,  Lionel,  14,  17 


302 


Index 


Keats,  imitations  of,  200,  204, 
207,  242 

L 

"La  Mer,"  200,  202 

"La  Sainte  Courtisane,"  2ig 

Labouchere,  Henry,  Author's 
letters  to,  etc.,  180-183 

"Lady  Windermere's  Fan,"  14, 
49,  221,  223 

Le  Gallienne,  199 

Leveson-Gower,  George,  64 

Lewis  and  Lewis,  Messrs.,  232 

Lewis,  George,  on  the  Queens- 
berry  proceedings,  93 

Lippincott's  Magazine — Publica- 
tion of  "Dorian  Gray,"  254, 
258 

Literature — EflFect  of  Wilde's 
works  and  the  Wilde  cult,  153, 
229,  266  et  seq.,  271,  292 

"Lord  Arthur  Saville's  Crime," 
219,  220 

Lykiardopulos,  Michael — Wilde 
in  Russia,  283-284 

Lytton,  Robert,  Earl  of,  63 

M 

Magdalen  College,  Oxford,  23 

Marlowe — Wilde's  piracies,  242 

Matthews,  Sir  Charles — With- 
drawal from  Queensberry  pro- 
ceedings, defence  of  Wilde  in 
subsequent  trials,  95,  99 

Meredith,  44,  62,  216 

Methuen,  Messrs.,  and  "Dorian 
Gray,"  244,  256 

Meynell,  Mrs.,  198 

Milton-Wilde  amalgamation, 
191 -192,  200,  205,  242 

"Model  Millionaire,"  220 

Montgomery,  Hon.  Mrs.  Alfred, 
126 

Montgomery,  Mr.  Alfred,  59,  68 

Morris,  William,  49 

N 

Napier,  Mr.  Mark,  64 
Naples  period,  6y 

Allegations  by  Sherard.   107, 
108 


Naples  period  (continued) 

Author's  books  sold  or   lost 

by  Wilde,  66 
Irreproachable   and   industri- 
ous life,  122,  125 
Money  question — 
All     expenses     borne     by 

Author,  119,  121,  124 
Desertion     on     mercenary 
grounds  alleged,  129-130 
Provision  made  for  Wilde 
after  Author's  departure, 
128-129 
Reputation  of  the  city,  social 
standing    of    Author,    etc., 
126 
Scandal    arising — Efforts    of 
relatives,    etc.,    to    effect   a 
separation,       127 — Success, 
128 
"New  Helen,"  207 
Newdigate      Prize     and      Lord 
Warkworth,  18 


Outlook  article  on  unpublished 
portions  of  "De  Profundis," 
155-156 

Oxford  Magazine,  Author's 
poem  in,  16 


"Panthea,''  200,  207 
Paris  Period — 

Drink,  vicious  habits  and  dis- 
ease,   134-137 

Earnings,   131 

Help  accepted  from  Author, 
loans  of  money,  etc.,  130, 
131,  132 

Last  days,  privations — Beg- 
ging letters,  etc.,  134,  137 

News  of  illness,  137 — Death, 

Funeral  expenses,  etc.,  paid 
by  Author,  138 
Pater,  Walter,  13,  44 
"Pentagram,"  11 
Percy,  Lord,  and  the  Newdigate, 

18 
"Picture  of  Dorian  Gray."    See 
"Dorian   Gray'* 


Index 


303 


Pinero,  Sir  A.,  Wilde's  admira- 
tion  of,   221 
Pope,  Wilde's  view  of,  199 
"Presence  of  mind,"   fable,  218 
Prison  Period,  7 

Author's  visits,  correspon- 
dence, etc.,  refused  through 
Ross,  III,  112 
Desertion  by  Author,  appear- 
ance of,  due  to  Ross- 
Wilde's  anger  resulting  in 
"De  Profundis,"  112,  115- 
116,  121 
Effect   on    spirit   and    moral 

fibre,   162  et  seq. 
Interview  on,  American  jour- 
nalist's offer,  140,  143 
Sherard's  account,  113-115 
Public  morals — Effect  of  Wilde's 
works  and  Wilde  cult,  227-229, 
263,  292 

Q 

Queensberry,      Dowager     Mar- 
chioness of,  130 
*'De    Profundis"    libels,    160, 

234,  280 
Dislike  of  Wilde,  13 
Queensberry,  late  Marquis  of — 
Libel  action  against — 
Action  leading  to  Wilde  pro- 
ceedings, 75,  81,  85 
Collapse — Reception  of  news 
by  Wilde,  varying  accounts, 
103-104 
Instigation    by    Author,    al- 
leged— Funds  supplied,  etc., 
75-76,  85,  86,  102 
Nature     of     Lord     Queens- 
berry's  accusation,  95 
Ross's,  Mr.,  responsibility,  93 
Reconciliation     with     Author, 

.76 
Wife,  divorce  from,  75 
Queensberry,    present    Marquis 
of,  lOI 

R 
Ransome,  Mr.  Arthur — 
"Critical  Study" — Aspersions 
on  Author  and  resulting 
libel  action,  6,  8,  53,  57,  69, 
82,  87,  116,  129,  130,  132, 
240,  250 


Ransome,  Mr.  Arthur,  "Critical 
Study,"  etc.    (continued) 

Author's  letters  to  Wilde,  use 
of,  166,  167  et  seq.,  251 

Author's  litigation  difficulties 
at  time  of  trial,  167 

"De  Profundis,"  unpublished 
portions,   use   of,    83,   237- 
239,  251 
Outlook  comments,  155-156 

Labouchere  letters  produced, 
181,  251 

Passages  complained  of  with- 
drawn, 107-108,  240,  253 

Revue  Blanche  article,  187 

Verdict,  reasons  for  not  ap- 
pealing, 252 

Wilde's  reputation,  effect  on, 

253 
"De  Profundis,"  153 
Wilde's  poetry,  views  on,  199- 

200 
Wilde's  vices,  views  on,   197 
"Ravenna,"  241 
Reading,  imprisonment  at.     See 

Prison  Period 
Regnier,  M.  Henri  de,  64 
Reid,  Sir  Robert,  92 
Revue  Blanche  article,  185-187 
Ross,  Mr.  Robert,  56,  6g 

"De    Profundis,"    editing    of, 
etc.,  8,  69,  98,  116,  118,  119, 
138 
Author's  letter,  failure  to  re- 
ply to,  152 
Preface,  146 

Unpublished   parts   presented 
to  British  Museum  and_  in- 
junction   obtained    against 
Author,  8,  83 
"Harlot's   House,"   publication 

stopped,  145 
Imprisonment   Period,   treach- 
erous action  during,  iii  ^ 
Legal   representative    and  ^  lit- 
erary   executor    of    Wilde, 
139,  278,  279 
Ransome's   book,   biographical 

details  supplied  for,  53 
Ransome     trial,     co-operation 
in,  251 
Ruskin,  62 
Russell,  Messrs.,  251 


304 


Index 


Russia,    Wilde's    reputation    in, 
283-285,  286 

S 
St.  James's  Ga:;ette — Review  of 
^^  "Dorian  Gray,"  258 
"Salome,"    64 — Foreign    reputa- 
tion, 283,  286 
Shakespeare,  Wilde  on,  210,  216 
Shaw,  Mr.  G.  B.,  34,  60,  224,  225 
Sherard,    Mr.    Robert    Harbor- 
ough,  87,  112,  IIS,  120 
Arrest   of   Wilde,   contradic- 
tory accounts,  103-104 
Biographies  of  Wilde,  248 
Mercure  de  France  article,  no 
Naples      Period,     allegations 

against  Author,  107 
Prison  life  of  Wilde,  113-115 
"Sphinx"    rhymes,   assistance 

with,  159 
Wilde's  vices,  views  on,  182- 
183 
Smith,  Mr.  F.  E.,  228,  254 
Smithers,  Leonard,  131,  144 
"Soul  of  Man  under  Socialism," 

61 
"Sphinx,"  140,  198,  200,  207 
Poisonous  nature,  229 
Ransome,  Mr.,  on,  243 
Rhymes     supplied     by     Mr. 

Sherard,    159 
Tennysonian  metre,  201,  202, 

204 
Time  taken  to  complete,  159 
"Sphinx  without  a  Secret,"  220 
"Spirit  Lamp,"  16-17 
Swinburne,  17,  20,  34,  44,  62 

Wilde  on,  209 
Symonds,  J.  A.,  12,  17 
Symons,  Arthur,  34,   199 

T 

Tennyson,   18,  44,  6^ 

Wilde's    imitations    of,    200, 
201,  202,  203,  204 
Terry,  Miss  Ellen,  Wilde's  Son- 
nets to,  44 
Trials  of  Wilde- 
First  trial — 
Arrest  of  Wilde,  92— Letter 
to    Author,     reproduction 
precluded    by    injunction, 
93 


Trials     of     Wilde— First     trial 

{continued) 

Bail,  efforts  to  arrange,  96 

Desertion  by  Author  alleged 

— Facts    in    contradiction, 

96-99,     180— Reasons     for 

leaving  England,   100,  109 

Desertion    by    friends    and 

wife,  91,  96 
Result,  100 

Truth  of  charges  admitted, 
99 
Second  trial   decided    on,    100 
Bail,  admission  to — Sureties, 

lOI 

Reasons    for    remaining    to 
face    trial— Misconception 
of  position,  101-103 
Verdict  and  sentence,  104 — 
Justice  of,   Wilde's   state- 
ment  according  to   Sher- 
ard, 104 
Truth,  179 
Turner,  Mr.  Reggie,  57,  118,  120 

W 

Waller,  Sir  Lewis,  96 

Ward,  Lock  &  Co.,  Messrs.,  258 

Warkworth,  Lord,  and  the  New- 

digate,  18 
Warren,  Mr.,  President  of  Mag- 
dalen, 12 
Author's   poetry,   opinion  of, 

16 
Opinion  of  Wilde,  13,  30 
Webb,  Mr.  Godfrey,  64,  66 
Webster's    "Duchess    of    Malfi," 

Wilde  on,  210 
"Whispers,"  159 
Whistler- 
Cribs  from,  44,  49 
Quarrel  with  Wilde,  45 
Wilcox,  Miss  Ella  Wheeler,  198 
Wilde,   Lady,  Z3 
Wilde,  Mrs.,  74,  112 

Abandonment    of    Wilde    at 

time  of  trial,  96 
Objections  to   intimacy   with 

Author,  74,  87 
Separation  from  Wilde  after 
his  release — Charge  against 
Author,  120 


Index 


305 


Wilde,  Oscar  Fingall  O'Flaher- 
tie   Wills- 
Author,  intimacy  with,  money 
relations,  etc.   See  Douglas, 
Lord  Alfred,   also   Naples, 
Paris,  etc. 
Conversation,  14-15,  20,  29 
Crabbet    Club,    reception    as 

member,   64-65 
Death,  137-138 
Drink  as  inspiration,  etc.,  38, 

136 
Expensive  tastes,  71 
Gourmet    and     trencherman, 

57,  69,  72-73,  136 
Humor,  289 
Imprisonment     at     Reading. 

See  Prison  Period 
''King  of  Life"  and  "Lord  of 

Language,"  42 
Life  after  imprisonment.  See 
titles  Berneval,  Naples  and 
Paris 
Literary  work — 

Contemporary  art,  attitude 

towards,  44-45 
Credo     from     preface     to 
"Dorian  Gray,"  46  et  seq. 
Current  opinion,  exaggera- 
tion  of    Wilde's   import- 
ance, 26,  42,  51,  213,  215, 
226-228,  231 
Debt  to  Author,  124,  224 
Degradation    of    language, 

51 
Evil    intention    and    influ- 
ence— Effect  of  Wilde's 
"teaching"      and      the 
Wilde  myth,  26,  44,  229, 
246,  257  ^ 
Intensification  of  person- 
ality, etc.,  due  to  vice — 
Mr.    Ransome's    state- 
ment,    116-117,     244 — 
Excuse  for  vice,  245 
Foreign  reputation,  283,287 
Genius,  question  of,  3,  247 
Hindrance    by    Author    al- 
leged, 124,  158,  176 
Indifference  of  editors  and 
publishers   after   Wilde's 
release,  141,  142 


Wilde,     Oscar,     Literary    work 
(continued) 

Literary  remains,  139 
Methods  of  work,  159 
Paris  period,   sums  earned 

in,  131 
Plagiarisms  and  imitations, 
191,  200  et  seq. — Mr.  Ran- 
some's   admissions,    241- 
242 
Spirit  Lamp,  contributions 

to,  17 
Wilde's  self-knowledge,  50, 

248 
See       also       sub-headings 
Plays,  Poems,  Prose,  and 
Stories,  and  for  particu- 
lar works  see  their  names 
Oxford  and  Magdalen,  11,  12 
Plays- 
Exaggerated  current  esti- 
mate, 222-223 
Pinero,  Sir  A.,  as  model, 

222 
Wilde's  opinion  of,  220 
Poems — 

Biographers,    claims    of, 

199-200 
Reception,    198,  220 
Ross,     Mr. — Preface     to 
selected    poems,    198 — 
Titles  bestowed  by,  205 
Self-knowledge,   199,  220 
Sonnets,  205,  206 
Technical     defects,     205, 

209 
Theory  of  poetry,  197,  209 
Prose   works — Wilde   as    su- 
preme artist,  213 
Ransome,  Mr.,  on,  243 
Reception  of,  221 
Style,  217 

Wilde's  own  opinion,  214 

Queensberry        Proceedings. 

See     Queensberry,     late 

Marquis  of 

Scholarshfp,  15 

Shallowness    and    indolence, 

49-50,  292 
Social     standing     and     fash- 
ion, claims  to,  34  et  seq., 
56  et  seq. 


306 


Index 


Wilde,  Oscar  (continued) 
Socialism,  6i 

Stories — Fables,  etc.,  217,  219 
Models  and  Imitations,  220 
Unpublished  examples,  218 
Trials.    See  that  title 
Vanity    in    regard    to    looks, 
clothes,  etc.,  33  et  seq.,  58 
—Voire  Papa  story,  188- 
189 
Wilde,  William,  53 
Wills,  Mr.  Justice,  180 


"Woman  of  No  Importance,"  71, 

123 
Woman's  World,Wi\At's  editor- 
ship of,  258 
"Writing  on  the  Floor,"  pamph- 
let, 273 
Wyndham,  George,  58,  92 

Letters  to  Author  after  Ran- 
some  trial,  169,  171,  173, 177 
Outlook  article  on  Ransome 
trial,  156 
Wyndham,  Mr.  Percy,  62 


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